The Devil in Gray

GRAHAM MASTERTON

BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SPIRIT

DEVIL IN GRAY

HIGH PRAISE

FOR GRAHAM MASTERTON!

"One of the most consistently entertaining writers in the field."

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"Graham Masterton is always a lot of fun and he rarely lets the reader down.... Horror's most consistent provider of chills."

—Masters of Terror

"Masterton is a crowd-pleaser, filling his pages with sparky, appealing dialogue and visceral grue."

—Time Out (UK)

"Masterton is one of those writers who can truly unnerve the reader with everyday events."

—Steve Gerlach, author of Rage

"Masterton has always been in the premier league of horror scribes."

—Publishing News

KILLED BY NO ONE

George was soaping his chest when he felt something cold sliding down the inside of his left leg. Looking down, he saw that he was bleeding from a long thin cut that ran all the way from his testicles to the side of his knee. Blood was already running down his calf, mingled with foam and wa­ter, swirling down the drain.

How the hell...?

George reached out of the shower for his towel. He could tell that the cut must be deep as well as long, because the blood was a rich arterial color, and it was flowing out in thick surges.

"Jean!" he shouted. "Jean, I need some help here!"

He tugged his towel off the rail and wound it around his thigh as tightly as he could. All the same, it was soaked scar­let in a matter of seconds.

He lifted his right hand to turn off the water, but as he did so he felt an intense slice across his knuckles, and another cut appeared, so vicious that it almost severed his little fin­ger. He cried out in bewilderment more than pain, and thrust his hand into his mouth, so that it was filled up with the me­tallic taste of fresh blood.

George staggered sideways. He slid down the wall until he was down on his knees. His back was cut in a series of diagonal slices that went right through to his shoulder-blades and his ribs. He actually felt the blade sliding against the bone. He flailed around with his bleeding hands, trying to stop his invisible assailant from cutting him any more, but there was nobody there....

Other Leisure books by Graham Masterton:

THE DOORKEEPERS

SPIRIT

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT PREY

GRAHAM MASTERTON

DEVIL IN GRAY

^{LEISURE BOOKS} NEW ^YORK CITY

A LEISURE BOOK October 2004

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 200 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

Copyright © 2004 by Graham Masterton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

ISBN 0-8439-5361-6

The name "Leisure Books" and the stylized "12' with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.

D^EVIL IN GRAY

CHAPTER ONE

Downstairs, the long-case clock in the hallway struck three. One, pause, two, pause, three, as if it were dolefully counting out how many lives would be lost before it struck again.

Jerry finished slapping paste onto the second-to-last roll of cornflower-patterned wallpaper and began to climb up the stepladder with it double folded over his arm. Three more lengths and the nursery would almost be ready for baby—just as soon as baby was ready for the nursery, anyhow.

He had been decorating the nursery for over a week and he had transformed it from the poky, neglected little box room it had been when they first moved in. Now the paint-work shone glossy and white, the pine door had been stripped and waxed and the doorknob polished. Once he had finished pasting up the wallpaper, there would be noth­ing more to do than hang the matching flowery drapes, lay the pale blue carpet, and move in the crib and the chest of drawers.

1

Jerry had never felt so buoyant in his life. Less than four months ago he had been promoted to full partner at Shockoe Realty, with a $17,500 hike in salary. At last he and Alison had been able to move out of their single-bedroom apartment on the second floor of Alison's parents' house south of the river and buy this tall, narrow Victorian house in the historic Church Hill district—a rare fixer-upper that hadn't come on the market for over forty-five years. Admittedly, "fixer-upper" was an understatement, because the elderly couple who had lived here since 1959 had let the rain soak into the left-hand side of the eaves since the closing days of the Nixon adminis­tration, and they hadn't changed the kitchen fittings since Buddy Holly died. But Jerry was a home-improvement buff who was in his element when he was sawing and painting and wiring and putting up shelves. Alison complained that he suffered from "fixamatosis."

He was a well-built young man of thirty-one, with cropped blond hair, a snub nose, and a cheery, obliging face—almost a natural-born Realtor. Apart from decorating he enjoyed football and hockey and white-water rafting on the James River rapids, and barbecues. He had a taste for khaki Dockers and red-checkered seersucker shirts.

As he climbed the stepladder he was singing to himself "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?" It was Alison's favorite song. He had fallen for her the moment he first saw her that summer lunchtime three and a half years ago sit­ting alone on a bench by the Kanawha Canal, eating a cia­batta salad sandwich and reading a book. He thought she looked so darn fresh. She had bouncy blond hair and wide blue Doris Day eyes and she wore sleeveless blouses with turned-up collars and tight blue jeans so that she looked like the next-door sweetheart from a 1960s sitcom.

She wasn't dumb, though. The book she had been read­ing by the canal was Ulysses, by James Joyce. Jerry had sat

2

down next to her and bent his head sideways so that he could read the spine. "Hey, Ulysses. I saw the movie of that, with Kirk Douglas." She had laughed; and they had started talking; and she had never found out that he hadn't been joking. He had found the book early last year and opened it, and read the words "History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," and shook his head in a silent admission of bewilderment.

Alison called up the stairs, "Jerry, sweetheart, your chicken sandwich is ready. Do you want a beer with it?"

"Sure. Give me a minute, could you? I'm just—"

Balancing on top of the stepladder, he positioned the pa­per against the wall and butted the edge to the previous piece. He creased the top against the ceiling with the han­dle of his craft knife and started to cut it.

As he did so, blood welled out from under his left hand and started to slide down the wall. "Shit," he said. The cut didn't hurt but he didn't want to mess up the paper. He gripped the knife in his teeth and reached around for the damp cloth that was hanging from the back pocket of his jeans.

When he lifted his hand away from the wall to wipe it, he saw that he had somehow cut himself vertically all the way down from his wrist to his elbow—and cut himself deep. There was a bloody handprint on the paper, and now blood was starting to run down his arm and drip quickly from his elbow. Instead of trying to wipe the mess off the wall, he wound the cloth tightly around his arm and shouted out, "Alison! Alison!"

There was a pause, then: "What's wrong? Do you need any help with the wallpaper?"

"I've cut myself, can you bring me up a towel or something?"

He eased himself down the stepladder, holding his arm

upright to relieve the pumping of his circulation. All the

3

same the cloth was already soaked a dark crimson and drops of blood were pattering across the bare-boarded floor. The piece of wallpaper slid drunkenly sideways and then dropped down by his feet.

"Alison!"

"I'm coming!" she puffed. She reached the top of the stairs and crossed the landing, holding a checkered tea towel and a packet of Band-Aids. "My God," she said, when she saw the reddened cloth and the blood spattered all over the floor. "My God, Jerry, how did you do that?"

"I don't know . . . I was just trimming the top edge. I didn't even feel anything."

"My God, let me look at it."

She took hold of his hand and unwound the cloth. The cut in his arm was far more than an accidental nick—it was the kind of cut that a determined suicide would make, and blood was welling out of it relentlessly. Alison dabbed at it, but it was bleeding faster and faster, and in less than a minute her tea towel was drenched red, too. She took off her apron and bundled it into a pad.

"My belt," Jerry said, unfastening his buckle. "Tie it tight around here." He was already beginning to gulp with shock. "That's it, really tight."

Alison pulled out his brown leather belt and lashed it around his arm just below his bicep. She pulled it so tight that it squeaked. "Come downstairs, quick," she said. "I'll call 911."

She helped him to the door and down the two flights of stairs. He leaned against the wall as he went, leaving a bloody smear on the primrose-colored paint. When he reached the last three stairs he stumbled and staggered for­ward, and Alison had to pull at his shirt to stop him from falling over.

"Here," she said, as they went through to the kitchen. "Sit

4

down. Keep your arm up high and I'll call the paramedics." Jerry kept swallowing and swallowing as if he were thirsty. The bundled-up apron was already soaked, and blood poured onto the kitchen table, running along the grain of the freshly stripped pine.

Alison picked up the phone. "Yes, ambulance, please. It's really urgent. My husband's cut his arm and he's bleeding so bad."

There was a blurting noise on the phone, and then the operator said, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"

"It's my husband! There's blood everywhere!"

"There seems to be a fault on the line, please say that again."

"For God's sake! My name is Alison Maitland, 4140 Davis Street, Church Hill! It's my husband!"

Jerry was sitting with his arm still raised, but his eyes were closed. Alison said, "Jerry! Jerry! Are you okay?"

His eyes flickered open and he nodded. "Feeling woozy, that's all."

"Please tell them to get here quick," Alison begged the operator. "I think he's going to pass out."

"Ma'am, can you repeat that address, please? I can hardly hear you."

"Forty-one forty Davis Street! You have to help me! There's so much blood! I've tied his belt around his arm, but he's cut himself all the way down from his wrist to his elbow. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? There's so much blood!"

Jerry suddenly slumped forward, so that his forehead was pressed against the bloody tabletop. Alison dropped the phone and went over to lift him up again. "Jerry, you have to stay awake! I've called for the paramedics, they won't be long!"

Jerry stared at her with unfocused eyes. "I feel cold, Ali­son. Why am I feeling so goddamned cold?"

5

She bent over him and put her arms around him. "It's the shock, sweetheart. You have to hold on."

"What?"

"Think of our baby. Think of Jemima. Think of all the good times we're going to have together."

"Good times," he repeated, numbly, as if he couldn't un­derstand what she meant.

She heard a tiny, diminished voice. It was coming from the phone that was dangling from the wall. "Hello? Hello? Are you still there, ma'am? Hello?"

She went over and scooped up the phone. "My husband looks just awful. He's shivering and he's very pale. How much longer is that ambulance going to take?"

"Hello? I'm sorry, you'll have to repeat that."

"My husband's dying! How much longer are you going to be?"

"Do you have another phone there? Maybe a cell phone?" "Listen!" Alison screamed. "I just need to know when the paramedics are going to get here!"

"Only about a minute now. Hold on."

Alison turned back to Jerry. She was shaking so much that she could hardly speak. "They're almost here now, sweetheart. Hang on in there."

She opened the kitchen closet and pulled out five or six clean tea towels, dropping even more of them onto the floor. As she bent to pick them up, she heard Jerry say, "Ah!" as if something had surprised him. She turned around, and to her horror saw that he had a deep horizontal cut on his face, starting from a quarter of an inch beneath his left eye, across his cheek, and into his ear, so that his earlobe was dangling from a single shred of skin.

Blood was streaming down his chin and spattering his shirt-collar.

"Jerry! Oh my God, what's happened?"

6

He was so stunned that all he could do was shake his head from side to side, so that droplets of blood flew across the tabletop.

Alison folded up one of the tea towels and held it to his face. "The knife, Jerry . . . where's the knife? What have you done to yourself ?"

She pried open his left hand, sticky with blood, but it was empty, and he wasn't holding anything in his right hand, ei­ther. She looked on the floor, but there was no sign of his knife anywhere. How could he have cut himself, without a knife? She lifted the tea towel away from his face for a mo­ment and she could see that the cut under his eye was so deep that it had exposed the yellow fat of his cheek and his cheekbone.

"Oh, sweetheart, what have you done?" she sobbed. There was so much blood in the kitchen that it looked as if they had been having a paint fight. But now she could hear the yip-yip-yipping of the ambulance siren, only two or three blocks away.

"Hear that, Jerry? It's the paramedics. Hold on, sweet­heart, please hold on."

Jerry rolled his eyes up and stared at her. He was shiver­ing, and he had the numb, desperate expression of some­body who knows that they are not very far from death.

"Jerry, you're going to make it. You're going to be fine, sweetheart. The ambulance is right outside."

Jerry had never felt so cold in his life—a dead, terrible, all-pervasive cold that was creeping into his mind and into his body and gradually freezing his soul. A few minutes ago the kitchen had been dazzling with afternoon sunlight, but now it seemed to be dimming, and all the colors were fading to gray.

"It's getting so dark," he said, and his voice was thick with shock.

7

The door chimes rang. Alison said, "Hold on, sweetheart. The paramedics are here." She stood up and started to walk toward the hallway. Jerry thought, Please, God, let me sur­vive. I have to survive, for Alison's sake, for the baby's sake. They already knew that she was going to be a girl, and they'd already chosen the name Jemima.

Alison reached the hallway, but as she did so she unex­pectedly stopped. Jerry stared at her, willing her to move, willing her to answer the door, but she didn't. She stayed where she was, in the colorless gloom; and she was swaying, like a woman who has suddenly remembered something dreadful.

"Alison?" he croaked. "Alison?"

She tilted—and then, in a succession of impossibly cho­reographed movements, like a mad ballet dancer, arms wav­ing, knees collapsing, she began to fall to the floor. As she did so, she pirouetted on one heel, so that she turned back to face him. Her eyes were staring at him in amazement.

For a moment Jerry couldn't understand what had hap­pened to her. But then her head dropped back as if it were attached to her body on nothing but a hinge. Her throat had been cut so deeply that she had almost been beheaded, and blood suddenly jumped up from her carotid artery and sprayed against the ceiling.

A minute later, when the paramedics kicked the front door open, they found Alison lying on her back in a treacle-colored pool of blood, and Jerry crouched down next to her, whimpering and whispering and trying with sticky hands to fit her head back onto her neck.

8

CHAPTER TWO

Decker sat up in bed and peered shortsightedly at his wristwatch. "Holy shit! Two-thirty already. Time I wasn't here."

Maggie grinned at him from underneath a tent of sheets. "Can't you stay for dessert, lover?" She had a thick, husky voice, as if she had been smoking too many Havana cigars.

"Ex-squeeze me? What was that—what we just did? Wasn't that dessert?"

"That? That was only a little something to tickle your palate."

"My palate? You were trying to tickle my palate? I'll tell you something about you, sweet cheeks. You are in serious need of anatomy lessons." Decker swung his legs out of bed and retrieved his glasses from the carpet. "Listen, I have to be back at headquarters about forty minutes ago. What did you do with my shorts?"

"You've lost your appetite, Decker, that's your trouble. You're growing weary of me."

9

He leaned across the bed and kissed her smartly on the forehead. He wasn't growing weary of her at all, but, Jesus, she was almost inexhaustible. She was a handsome, ripe, huge-breasted woman with skin the color of burnished egg­plants. Her eyes had a devilish glitter and her glossy red lips always looked as if they were about to say something outra­geous, and mostly they did. She snatched back the sheets to give him a split-second glimpse of those tiny gold and silver beads she wove into her pubic dreadlocks. Then instantly she bundled herself up again and gave him a dirty laugh.

"Hey," Decker protested, tapping his forehead. "I'm not weary up here but I'm worn out down there. Give me a break, will you?"

"Just showing you what's on the bill of fare, lover. If you don't want it . . . well, that's your choice."

"Listen—I have to go or Cab will assassinate me."

"He'd assassinate you even more if he knew where you were."

Decker switched his cell phone back on. Then he found his shorts under the bed and hopped into them like a one-legged rain dancer. He lifted his scarlet necktie and his crumpled white short-sleeved shirt from the back of the chair and retrieved his black chinos from the other side of the room. Maggie lay back on the pillow watching him dress. "So when am I going to see you again? And don't give me that 'whenever' stuff."

"I don't know. Whenever. You know what my caseload's like."

"Oh, you mean Sandie in dispatch."

"Sandie and me, that was over months ago."

"What about Sheena?"

"Finished. Kaput. I haven't seen Sheena since Labor Day."

10

"Naomi?"

"What is this, the third degree?"

"More like every woman in the Metro Richmond tele­phone directory, lover man."

Decker went into the bathroom to comb his hair and straighten his necktie. He would have been the first to ad­mit that he didn't exactly look like a love god. But he was lean and rangy, with thick black hair in a rather bombastic pompadour, sage-green eyes, and a kind of etched, half-starved look about him that seemed to appeal to practically every woman he met. He liked his nose, too. Narrow. Pointed. Very Clint Eastwood.

His cell phone played the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth. Maggie mischievously reached across the bed and tried to snatch it off the nightstand, but Decker got there first. "Martin," he said, and touched his finger to his lips to tell Maggie to stop giggling.

"Martin, where the hell have you been?"

"Oh, hi, Cab." To Maggie, "It's Cab, for Christ's sake. Yeah, I'm sorry I'm running late, Cab. I had to swing by Oshen Street and talk to Freddie Wills. Well, he said he had something on that business on St. James Street. But listen, I'll be there in five."

"Forget coming back to headquarters. There's been a stabbing on Davis Street. I want your ass over here now." "Anybody dead?"

"Unless you know of a cure for missing head, yes."

"Jesus. Give me fifteen minutes. I'll pick up Hicks on the way."

"Hicks is already here. Just haul your rear end down here as soon as you can."

Decker sat down on the end of the bed to pull on his loafers. Maggie rose out of the white sheets behind him like

11

a gleaming black Venus rising from the foam and wrapped her arms so tightly around his neck that she almost throt­tled him.

"Cab's going fishing this weekend," she said, her breath thundering hot in his ear. She smelled like cinnamon and honey and sexual juices and sweat. "Maybe you'd be a duti­ful fellow officer and come around for dinner on Saturday evening, keep me company."

"Dinner with dessert?"

"Of course dinner with dessert. Dinner with three desserts."

Decker unwound her arms and stood up. He buckled on his shoulder holster with its absurdly huge nickel-plated Colt Anaconda .45. He lifted the revolver out, opened the chamber, and emptied out all of the shells. Then he kissed the tips of them, one by one, and thumbed them back in again.

"You never told me why you do that," Maggie said. "Hmm? Oh . . . superstition, that's all."

With an operatic chorus of tires, Decker pulled up outside 4140 Davis Street and climbed out of his shiny black Mercury Grand Marquis. This was an elegant, expensive district, with redbrick sidewalks and shady trees and nineteenth-century houses with white-pillared porches. Usually, at this time of day, it was soporific and almost com­pletely deserted, with no sign of life except for sleeping cats and American flags stirring idly in the breeze, but this after­noon there were four squad cars parked diagonally across the street with their lights flashing, an ambulance, a van from the Richmond Coroner's Department, two TV crews, a crowd of uniforms and forensic investigators and reporters and all of those people who turn up at homicide scenes

12

shouting on cell phones and looking harassed, even though Decker could never work out what most of them actually did. He even recognized Honey Blackwell from the mayor's office, all 235 pounds of her, in a daffodil-yellow suit and a daffodil-yellow bow in her hair.

"Afternoon, Ms. Blackwell."

"Afternoon, Lieutenant. Tragic business."

"Must be, if it took you away from Ma-Musu's." He was referring to her favorite restaurant, Ma-Musu's West African restaurant on Broad Street.

"You have a sharp tongue on you, Lieutenant. One of these days you're going to cut your own throat with it."

"Not a very tasteful remark to make, Ms. Blackwell, un­der the circumstances."

Captain Cab Jackson came down the front steps of 4140, closely followed by Sergeant Tim Hicks. "Come by way of the heritage trail, did you, Decker?" Cab demanded, check­ing his watch. Cab was huge, over six feet five inches, with a dented bald head like one of the bollards where the stern­wheelers tied up by the James River. All the same, his face was chubby and his voice was unexpectedly high, so he had grown himself a Little Richard–style moustache in the hope of investing himself with some extra maturity. He wore a red-and-yellow-striped shirt with rows of pens and pencils clipped in the pocket, and his buttocks stuck out so far at the back that Detective Rudisill had famously described them as "Mount Buttmore."

Hicks himself was short, handsome, young, and bouncily fit, like a human basketball. He had been transferred to Richmond's Central Zone only three months ago, from Fredericksburg, upstate, and he was still pepped up about working in the city. "We the elite," he kept repeating, as they drove around town, slapping his hand rhythmically on

13

the car door. Decker didn't have the heart to tell him that his transfer had probably had far less to do with the excel­lence of his service record than it did with the interim chief's urgent need to fill her quota of detectives of color.

"So what's the story?" Decker asked. "Pretty upscale neighborhood for a stabbing."

"You'd best come inside and see for yourself."

Decker followed Cab's buttocks up the front steps and in through the glossy, black-painted front door. He noticed that the frame was splintered, where the paramedics had kicked it open. Hicks bubbled, "I never saw anything like it. I mean, the blood, Lieutenant. It's like all over."

"Well, remember that you can decorate an entire living room with the blood from a single person's circulatory sys­tem. Two coats, if you use a roller."

Alison's pregnant body was still lying in the hallway, one shoe on, one shoe off. She was staring at the skirting board, her blue eyes wide open. She looked more baffled than hor­rified, even though her head was three inches away from her neck. Hicks was right about the blood. It was all over the polished oak floor, in splashes and smears and handprints. It was up the walls, all over the doors, spattered all over the cream linen blind. There was even a fan-shaped spray of blood on the ceiling.

Decker knew from experience that blood had a way of getting everywhere. You could shoot somebody in an up­stairs bedroom and tiny specks of blood would be found on the walls in the hall.

A sallow, acne-pitted police photographer called Dave Martinez was taking pictures, and the intermittent flash gave the optical illusion that Alison was still twitching. Decker hunkered down beside her and looked into her wide blue Doris Day eyes. She looked back at him, her expression pleading, What's happened to me?

14

Decker glanced at her blood-drenched smock. "How far gone?" he asked Cab.

"She was due on the twenty-first, according to her mother. But she was stabbed at least six times in the stom­ach. Baby didn't stand a frigging chance."

"Uncanny, don't you think?" Hicks said, breathing down Decker's neck. "She looks as if she's just about to say something."

"Oh yeah? You'd crap your pants if she did." Decker abruptly stood up again, so that Hicks had to step back out of his way. He collided with one of the kitchen chairs and almost lost his balance.

Cab sniffed and said, "Victim's name is Alison Maitland, aged twenty-eight, wife of Gerald Maitland, aged thirty-three, who's a junior partner with Shockoe Realty, 1818 East Cary Street."

"Where's Maitland now?"

"Still out in the ambulance. Arrested. Mirandized. They're giving him first aid for some serious lacerations to his arms and face. Don't worry . . . Wekelo and Saxman are with him."

"Talked to him yet?"

Cab shook his head. "I tried, but he's pretty shaken up. He said, 'It just kept cutting us.' I asked him what he was talking about, what kept cutting them, but he didn't give any response. Well, nothing that made any damn sense."

"I also heard him say, 'There was nobody there," Hicks put in. "He said it five or six times, 'There was nobody there, there was nobody there.' He was kind of muttering and mumbling, so you couldn't hardly hear him."

Hicks paused, and then he added, "Funny thing was, it wasn't like he was trying to convince me that there was no­body there. It was like he was trying to convince himself."

"I wouldn't read too much into that," Cab said. "Guy to‑

15

tally flipped, for whatever reason. Stress, business problems, domestic dispute, who knows? Every marriage is a mystery. Mine is, anyhow."

"Who called the cops?" Decker asked.

Hicks snapped the elastic band off his notebook. "Alison Maitland put in a 911 call at 13:56 screaming for an ambu­lance. She said something about blood and she called out her husband's name, but there was some kind of fault on the line and the rest of it was unintelligible. The paramedics ar­rived here at 14:14 but nobody answered the door and it took them a couple more minutes to gain access. When they broke in they found the victim lying right here in the hallway and her husband kneeling next to her, apparently attempting to replace her head."

"Looks like we're dealing with an optimist, then," Decker said.

"Gerald Maitland himself was very badly cut, especially his arms and face. In fact his injuries could have been life-threatening."

"Self-inflicted ?"

"Must have been. When the paramedics broke down the door, the security chain was still fastened on the inside. Of­ficers Wekelo and Saxman arrived a few minutes later at 14:28, and they found that all the back doors were securely locked and the only windows that were open were too small for anybody to have climbed in."

"Okay," Decker said, looking around. "What about the weapon?"

Cab said, "We haven't actually located it yet."

"We haven't located it? He would have needed a god­damned sword to cut her head off like this."

"Absolutely," Cab agreed. "Not only that, at least three of the abdominal injuries penetrated right through the vic­tim's body from front to back, which indicates that the

16

weapon was at least two feet long. But—whatever it was—we didn't find it in the immediate locality of the body." "You've been through the whole property?"

Hicks said, "I organized a quick room-to-room. But Ger­ald Maitland was absolutely smothered in blood, head to foot—his wife's blood and his own—and he couldn't have disposed of the weapon anyplace else in the house without leaving any footprints or handprints.

"There are some traces of blood on the wall staircase, but Maitland was hanging wallpaper immediately prior to the killing and it looks as if he might have cut himself with his craft knife. We found the knife on the floor in the nursery, but it only has a two-inch blade, and although it does have a few drops of blood on it it obviously wasn't the murder weapon."

"Kitchen knives?"

"All of them clean except a small cook's knife used for cutting a chicken sandwich."

Decker said, "Hicks—we need to do another search and we need to do it now. I want this whole house taken apart. Look outside in the yard. Take up the floorboards. Look in the toilet cisterns and the water tanks. For Christ's sake, a weapon that size—it has to be somewhere."

Hicks raised his eyebrows at Cab in a mute appeal, but Cab nodded his assent. "Let's just find this sucker, shall we?"

While Hicks called in five uniformed officers for another search, Decker and Cab stepped outside the front door, onto the porch. It was stiflingly hot out there, but at least it didn't reek of blood. One or two reporters shouted at Cab for a statement, but he waved his hand and shouted back, "Five minutes! Okay? Give me five minutes!"

He dragged out a large white handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. "Goddamned allergy. It's the myrtle. I'm a martyr to myrtle."

17

Decker said, "Maitland was frisked, I hope? I mean he couldn't have smuggled the weapon out of the house down the leg of his pants or anything?"

"Not a chance. Wekelo subjected him to a full body search before the paramedics carried him out of the house."

Decker brushed back his breeze-blown pompadour. "I don't know ... I'm beginning to smell something wrong with this already."

"So we haven't located the murder weapon. We probably will, but even if we don't we can still get a conviction. Who else could have done it?"

"You're probably right. But it kind of reminds me of the Behrens case. Like, Jim Behrens obviously garroted his entire family, but there was no apparent motive, and we never found the garrote, and Behrens claimed that some invisible force had come into his house and done it. The whole thing was so god­damned far out that the jury wouldn't convict." He put on his black-lense Police sunglasses. "Juries watch too much X-Files."

Cab sneezed and blew his nose again.

"I bet you'll shake that off, once you're out on the lake," Decker reassured him.

Cab frowned at him. "What are you talking about, lake?" "You're going fishing this weekend, aren't you?"

"Who told you that?"

"Er—you told me."

"When did I tell you?"

"I don't know . . . couple of days ago."

"I only decided last night."

"Well, you must've mentioned that you were thinking about it, that's all."

Cab narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "I'm going fishing with Bill and Alfredick, if you must know, out to the Falling Creek reservoir."

"That's great, Cab. You deserve a break."

18

"You think so?" Then—even more suspiciously, "Since when did you give a fuck?"

Decker was tempted to say, "Every time you're on duty," but all he did was shrug and say, "I care about my fellow of­ficers, Cab."

Cab still looked unimpressed, and blew his nose again.

19

CHAPTER THREE

Decker went back to headquarters. The first thing he wanted to do was listen to Alison Maitland's 911 call. Down in the basement, Jimmy Freedman, their sound technician, played it back for him, his chair tilted back, chewing gum and sniffing and tappety-tapping his pencil against the recording console.

"There's definitely a fault on the line, Sergeant, but it's not like any regular fault. The regular faults are usually opens, which give you white noise, or shorts, which gives you, like, static, or else you get intermittents, which are usually caused by earth shifting or water ingress. But you listen to this."

He switched on the tape, and Decker heard the 911 oper­ator responding to Alison's call. "Emergency, which ser­vice?" This was followed by a crackling sound, and a very faraway voice, screaming. "Yes, ambulance"—more scream­ing, more crackling—"urgent—bleeding so bad!"

"What the hell?" Decker said. "Sounds like she's got the TV on."

20

"Uh-huh," Jimmy said. "It's not background noise. It's ac­tually breaking into her call from another location." "Crossed line, then?"

Jimmy shook his head. "It could be some kind of resistive fault, like an earth or a contact. But it's very strange, the way it just switches off and on. Listen."

"It's my husband—blood everywhere!"

Decker blew out his cheeks. "That's when he must have been stabbing her. Jesus."

But then there was shouting. It sounded like a crowd, panicking, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

"For God's sake—Alison-4140 Davis Street—my hus­band!"

"Ma'am, can you repeat that address please? I can hardly hear you."

Screaming, and then a crunching noise.

"Forty-one forty Davis Street! You have to help me—so much blood—you hear me?"

Decker listened to the tape to the end. Then he said, "Any ideas? That sounds like a goddamned battle."

"Who knows? Somebody else could have had their phone

off the hook, and, like you say, there could have been a war movie playing on television. But it would have had to be a recording, because I checked the TV listings and there were no war movies playing on any channel when this call was being made.

"Like I say, though, it wasn't like a normal fault. I'll have to talk to Bill Duggan at the telephone company, see what he has to say about it. Meanwhile I'll do what I can to clean it up. Maybe we can hear what those guys are yowling about."

At 9:00 P.M. that evening, Decker received a call from the Medical College Hospital that Gerald Maitland had recov‑

21

ered sufficiently to be questioned. Decker called Hicks to see if he could join him, but Hicks was still taking 4140 Davis Street to pieces in his efforts to find the murder weapon.

He sounded exhausted.

"I was wondering whether we ought to cut open the couch. I mean it's real genuine leather, and it must have been pretty damned expensive."

"This is a homicide investigation, Hicks, not a furniture sale. Did you check up the chimneys?"

"I called in Vacu-Stack. They vacuum-cleaned all five of them, but all they found was dead birds."

"Tried the bedding? I found a shotgun sewn up in a mat­tress once."

"We tore up the mattresses, the comforters, the pillows. We pulled down the drapes—you know, in case the murder weapon was hidden in the hem. We even tore their clothes to pieces."

"Looked in the kitchen? Cereal boxes, packets of spaghetti, rolls of foil?"

"You name it, Lieutenant, we've looked in it."

"Okay . . . keep at it. I'll call you when I'm done at the hospital."

He was walking out through the shiny new lobby when a girl's voice called out, "Decker!"

He skidded to a reluctant stop and turned around. It was Officer Mayzie Shifflett, from traffic. She had a dimpled, kittenish face that made her look five years younger than she really was, with a little tipped-up nose and freckles and big brown eyes. Her khaki shirt was stretched tight over her small, rounded breasts, and her skirt was stretched tight over her firm, rounded bottom. Her blond hair was fastened in a tight French pleat.

"Are you avoiding me, Decker?"

22

"Of course not. Caseload, that's all."

"You weren't working Tuesday night, were you?" "Tuesday? Ah—when was Tuesday?"

"Tuesday was the day before yesterday, and Tuesday was the day when you were supposed to be taking me to Awful Arthur's."

He kicked the heel of his hand against the side of his head. "Jesus—you're right, I was. Oh, Mayzie, I'm so sorry. Tuesday, my God. Do you know what happened?"

"Of course I know what happened. I put on my killer blouse and I pinned up my hair and I sprayed myself with Giorgio and then I waited for two and a half hours watching Star Trek until I finally decided that you weren't going to show."

"My mom had a fall. Her hip, you know? I had to go see her. I'm truly sorry. I was so worried about her that I totally forgot we had a date."

"Your mom had a fall. Decker—can't you even lie to me without bring your mother into it?"

"I'm telling you the truth, Mayzie. Do you think I would pass up on a date with you unless something really, really se­rious came up? Listen—I promise that I'll make it up to you."

"Like when?"

"I'm not sure. You've heard about this homicide on Davis Street—young woman had her head cut off. It's a shocker—I'm right in the middle of that."

"Decker, I have to talk to you."

He clasped her shoulders and gave her a kiss on the fore­head. "Let's make it next Tuesday, then. Same place, same time."

"Decker, I have to talk to you sooner than that. I missed my period."

He snorted. "Can't you even lie to me without bringing my children into it?"

23

"I'm serious, Decker. I think I'm pregnant."

"Ah. Pregnant." He paused, and then he narrowed his eyes. "You're kidding me, right?"

She stared at him without blinking for a long, long time and gradually it dawned on him that maybe she wasn't kid­ding. He leaned closer and hissed, "How can you be preg­nant? You're on the pill, aren't you?"

"I had to stop taking it because of my antibiotics. It was only for two weeks. I didn't think that—"

"You didn't think that if you made love without being on the pill that there might be some remote risk of mother­hood? Or, even worse, fatherhood? I'm a detective, Mayzie, I'm not a daddy."

Mayzie's eyelashes sparkled with tears. "I'm sorry, Decker. I didn't mean it to happen. But we have to talk."

"What good is talking going to do?"

"I might be having your baby, Decker. It's not going to go away."

Decker took a deep breath. Detective George Rudisill was standing on the opposite side of the lobby, talking to a dithery old woman with her arm in a sling, and he gave Decker a slow, sly smile. Decker thought, Shit, this is all I need.

"All right, Mayzie," he said. "I have to go talk to my chief

suspect right now. But I'll meet you at the Tobacco Company bar at, say—what time is it now? Eight o'clock, okay?" "You'll be there, right? You won't let me down?" "I swear on my mother's hip."

God, thought Decker. To look at, Mayzie was a peach. But whenever they had sex she let out a peculiar piping noise, like a wild goose flying south for the winter, and when they weren't having sex and she wasn't piping she never wanted to talk about anything but soap operas and nail pol‑

24

ish and how she had once appeared in the audience in Oprah! (she had the videotape, if you wanted to see her, fifth row from the back, in the purple spotted dress).

Decker had invited her to Awful Arthur's for a last dinner to say, "Sorry, Mayzie, but I don't think this is really working out." It wasn't working out so much that he had totally for­gotten to go.

"Eight o'clock," she insisted, and walked off back toward the traffic department.

Decker stood alone for a moment, slowly massaging the muscles at the back of his neck. Rudisill came up to him and grinned. "Hi, Lieutenant. Everything okay?"

"Sure, why shouldn't it be?"

"Shifflett didn't look too happy."

"Women are always happy, George. Especially when they're miserable."

Jerry Maitland was propped up in bed with the left side of his face and both of his arms thickly bandaged, so that he looked like a snowman. His pupils were dilated and he still smelled of the operating theater. The redheaded nurse said, "Ten minutes and no more, please, Lieutenant."

"You like Mexican food?" Decker asked her.

"I'm married."

"Being married affects your taste buds?"

"Nine minutes," the nurse said and closed the door be­hind her.

Decker approached the bed. Jerry stiffly turned his head to stare at him. Decker said nothing at first, but went over to the window and parted the slatted blinds with two fingers. Down below he could see the brightly lit sidewalks of Mar­shall Street, and the intersection with Fourteenth Street. Af­ter a while, he turned back and said, "How's tricks, Gerald?"

25

Jerry shook his head, but didn't say anything.

Decker drew up a chair and straddled it backward, shift­ing Jerry's plasma drip so that he could sit a little closer. "Is it Gerald or can I call you Jerry?"

"Jerry's okay," Jerry mumbled.

"Jerry it is, then. My name's Decker. Don't know what my parents were doing, giving me a goddamn outré name like that. It was something to do with my great-great-grandfather. Fought in the army of northern Virginia, in the Civil War."

Jerry tried to cough, but it obviously strained the stitches in his face, and he had to stifle it.

Decker said, "Hurts, huh?"

Jerry nodded. Decker nodded too, as if in sympathy. "You can have your lawyer present, you know that, don't you?"

"I don't need a lawyer. I haven't done anything."

"You're sure about that? It might be in your own best interest."

Jerry shook his head.

"Okay," Decker said. Then, quite casually, "What did you do with the knife?"

"I was putting up wallpaper and I cut myself. I don't know how. I dropped the knife on the floor."

"No, no. That's not the knife I mean, Jerry. That was a teensy weensy little craft knife. I'm talking about the other knife."

"The other knife?"

"That's right. I'm talking about the great big two-foot long mother that you used to cut off Alison's head."

"You don't seriously believe that I killed her? How can you think—I love her. She's my wife. Why would I want to kill her?"

"Well, that's what I'm trying to find out, Jerry, and it

26

would make it a whole lot less complicated if you told me what you did with the knife."

"There was no knife. Don't you understand? There was no knife."

"So what did you cut her head off with? A pair of nail scissors? Come on, Jerry, there was nobody else in the house but you and Alison, and Alison wasn't just decapitated—she suffered more than seventeen deeply penetrative stab wounds and serious lacerations. I've been listening to her 911 call. The operator asks her what's wrong and she keeps saying, 'My husband."

Jerry's eyes filled up with tears. "She was calling because of me. I got cut first."

"Oh yes, by whom exactly?"

"By whatever it was that killed Alison. I didn't touch her. I love her. We were going to have a baby girl."

Decker was silent for a while. Then he reassuringly pat­ted Jerry's arm. "All right, Jerry. You didn't touch her. But if you can tell me where the knife is, I can have the handle checked for fingerprints, and if it really wasn't you who did it, then we'll know for sure, won't we?"

"There was no knife. My arms got cut and then my face got cut, but I never saw a knife."

"You were alone, though? There was nobody else there except you and Alison? Is that what you're telling me?" Jerry nodded, miserably.

Decker sat in thought for a minute or two, his hand cov­ering his mouth. Then he said, "Okay, supposing that's what happened. How do you explain it?"

"I don't know. There was blood all over the kitchen. I was sure that I was going to die. Then Alison went to answer the door to the paramedics and she suddenly . . ."

"Go on. Take your time."

27

"I wasn't anywhere near her. She just collapsed. She kind of spun around, and—fell onto the floor and—her head—"

He turned his face away, rhythmically beating his ban­daged arm against the blankets. All that he was capable of uttering were high, strangulated sobs.

"Okay," Decker said, after a while. "Let's leave it at that for now."

He stood up and placed the chair back against the wall. He had no doubt at all that Jerry had murdered his wife, simply because there was no other rational explanation. But there was little point in trying to question him until he came out of shock. Decker had seen it so many times before: mothers who couldn't admit that they had smothered their babies, husbands who genuinely believed that somebody else had shot their wives, even when they were standing over the body with a discharged revolver in their hand. Dis­association, they called it.

He left the room. A uniformed officer was sitting outside reading the sports pages. He put his paper down and started to stand up but Decker said, "That's okay, Greeley. Got any hot tips for Colonial Downs?"

"Mr. Invisible in the 3:45, twenty-five to one."

"Mr. Invisible, huh?" He glanced back at Jerry Maitland lying bandaged up in bed. There was no knife. There was no­body there.

He walked down to the nurses' station.

"That was quick," she remarked.

"I'm known for it. You're sure about that dinner invita­tion? I know a place where they do the world's most aphro­disiac tamales."

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I went to a palmist recently, and she made it quite clear that my future doesn't include Mex­ican meals with law enforcement officers."

28

"That's because she was predicting the wrong line. She was predicting your head line instead of your heart line."

"No, she wasn't. She was predicting your cheesy pickup line."

29

CHAPTER FOUR

Decker drove back to the Maitland house. Hicks was standing under a battery of floodlights outside with three uniformed officers and two more detectives from Customer Service Zone Central, John Banks and Newton Fry. The television trucks were still there, as well as scores of milling spectators. The evening was sticky and warm and smelled of live oaks and traffic fumes.

Decker ducked under the POLICE LINE tape. "So . . . no weapon yet?"

Hicks wiped a white smudge of plaster dust from the end of his nose. "I just don't get it. We've pretty much demol­ished the whole house and I'm damned if I can understand how Maitland got rid of it."

"I still think there must have been a third person pres­ent," Banks said. He was short and squat with a chest like a pit bull terrier. "I know Maitland insists that there wasn't, but what kind of mental state was he in? Or maybe he's cov­ering for somebody."

30

Hicks shook his head. "We didn't find any footprints or handprints, apart from Mr. and Mrs. Maitland's. If there was a third person, how the hell did he or she get out of the house without leaving any tracks?"

"Maybe they got out before the blood started spraying around too much. Two-foot-long knives don't just disappear into thin air, do they?"

Decker checked his watch. It was 7:46 already and he was supposed to be meeting Mayzie at 8:00. "Look," he said, "let's call it a night and get back on to it in the morning. We need to question Maitland again before we can take this any further, and right now he's not exactly compos mentis."

He was just about to leave when a uniformed officer came up to him and said, "Excuse me, Lieutenant. There's a lady here wants to talk to you."

"Oh yes?"

"Says she was walking past here just after two o'clock this afternoon. Says her daughter saw somebody coming out of the house."

"Really?" Decker frowned shortsightedly at the crowd. "Bring her over, would you?"

The officer lifted the tapes and ushered over a middle-aged woman in a green flowery dress. She had fraying gray hair that even a dozen frantically crisscrossed bobby pins had failed to secure in a bun. She was accompanied by a plump teenage girl with Down's syndrome. The girl was dressed in a tight beige cardigan and a brown pleated skirt and she clung to her mother's arm.

"Hi," Decker said. "My name's Lieutenant Martin. My of­ficer tells me that your daughter may have witnessed some­body coming out of this house this afternoon."

The woman gave an enthusiastic nod. "We didn't think anything about it until we saw it on the news, did we, Sandra?"

31

The girl covered her face with her hand so that only her milky blue eyes looked out. "Sandra can be very shy some­times," the woman explained.

Decker said, "What time did you see this person exactly?" "Just past two o'clock. I come to collect Sandra from her

art class at two and we always walk back this way." "Can you describe him?"

"Well, no. I didn't see him. Only Sandra did. She tugged my sleeve and said, 'Look at that man, Mom, don't you think he's so scary?' "

Decker frowned. "Sandra saw him but you didn't? How come?"

"Not didn't, Lieutenant. Couldn't."

"Excuse me, Mrs.—"

"Plummer, Eunice Plummer. And it's Ms."

"Okay, I'm sorry, Ms. Plummer. I don't think I'm quite following you here. Sandra said, 'Look at that scary man,' but you couldn't see him?"

"I can't always see the people that Sandra sees. I don't have her gift."

Decker thought, Oh, shit. Another psychic. He thought they ought to make it illegal for impressionable people to see movies like The Others and The Sixth Sense.

He took off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his fore­head with the back of his hand. "Does Sandra see people very frequently, Ms. Plummer? I mean, people that you can't see?"

"Not often, no. She saw a preacher once, outside St. John's Church, in the graveyard. And then she saw a black woman in a funny hat, by Mason's Hall."

"I see. Has she talked to her doctor about this?"

Eunice Plummer looked puzzled. "Why should she talk to her doctor about it?"

32

"Well . . . it must be some kind of a symptom, right?" "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. A symptom of what, exactly?" Decker tried to put it diplomatically. "Seeing things, you

know, having hallucinations . . ."

"Lieutenant, Sandra doesn't have hallucinations. She sees people that others can't, that's all. It's a facility, not a deficiency. It's like dogs hearing very high notes that are way beyond the range of the human ear. Not that I would ever compare Sandra to a dog."

"Of course. Well—I'd just like to thank you and Sandra for being so public-spirited."

"Don't you want to know what he looked like?"

"I'm sorry?"

"The man," Eunice Plummer insisted. "Don't you want to know what he looked like?"

"I, ah ... I don't really think that a description is going to be necessary at this stage. Thanks all the same."

Sandra slowly lowered the hand that had been covering her face. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a large thumbprint on her glasses. "He was dressed all in gray," she blurted out.

Decker didn't know what to say, but Eunice Plummer coaxed her. "Go on, Sandra, tell Lieutenant Martin exactly what the man was wearing."

"He wore a gray hat like a howboy hat and a gray hoat with wings on. And he had a big black beard."

"I see," Decker said, with a tight, embarrassed smile. "That's very helpful, Sandra."

"And he had boots."

"Boots, terrific."

"Aren't you going to write this down?" Eunice Plummer asked. "She saw him, you know. She saw him as plain as day."

33

"Oh, sure," Decker said. He took out his notebook and a ballpoint pen that he had liberated from the Berkeley Ho­tel. While Eunice Plummer watched him, he jotted down Gray. Hat. Coat. Wings?? Boots.

"Big black beard," she added.

"Big black beard," Decker acknowledged.

"And a sword," Sandra put in.

Decker looked up. "Sword?"

"He had a sword. He wasn't carrying it. It was hanging down." She indicated with a little hand play that it had been suspended from his belt.

Decker closed his notebook. Sandra was staring at him and her expression was so fierce and unblinking that he al­most believed her.

"When you first saw this man, where was he?" he asked. Sandra pointed to the porch. "He walked through the door."

"So the door was actually open?"

She vigorously shook her head.

"Sandra—how did he walk through the door if it wasn't open?"

"He walked through the door," she repeated. She pro­nounced it, emphatically, har000.

"All right . . . he walked through the door and then what?"

"He went down the steps and then he went that way." She pointed westward, toward North Twenty-sixth Street.

Eunice Plummer said, "She never lies, Lieutenant. She's incapable of telling any untruth, even if she knows she's go­ing to get punished."

Decker said, "You go to art class, Sandra? Do you like to draw?"

Sandra nodded. "I like to draw and paint and I like pottery."

34

The Devil in Gray

"That's good, because I'll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to draw me a picture of this man you saw walking through the door. Then when you're done, I want you to call this number and I'll send an officer around to your home tomorrow morning to collect it. Do you think you can do that for me?"

"She can do it," Eunice Plummer put in. "She's really very good."

"I'm sure she is."

The officer escorted Eunice Plummer and Sandra back to the police line. Before she ducked under the tape, Sandra turned around and gave Decker a shy little wave. Decker waved back.

"Who's your new girlfriend?" Hicks said.

"A very sweet young lady, that's all I can say."

"She really see anybody?"

"No, I don't think so. Her mother says she has some kind of extrasensory perception . . . sees people walking around that nobody else can see. Must be something to do with im­paired brain function."

"So how did you leave it?"

"I've asked her to draw the man she saw, that's all. If nothing else, it might act as some kind of therapy." "Since when did you become Bruce Willis?"

35

CHAPTER FIVE

It was ten after midnight by the time Decker let himself into his loft on Main Street and closed and chained the door behind him. He had been delayed for over fifteen min­utes by a construction truck parked across the street while it was loaded with asbestos stripped out of Main Street Sta­tion. The station was being renovated and the trains were being brought back into the city center, but the Virginia Board of Health still had offices in what had once been the train shed, so asbestos stripping could only be done at night.

Decker tossed his crumpled black linen coat onto the couch and eased off his heavy shoulder holster, hanging it up on the old-style hat stand. He hadn't eaten since eleven this morning and he had bought two chicken breasts with the intention of making himself a Mexican chicken stir-fry, but he was well past hunger—and he was far too tired to cook anything now. He put the chicken into the fridge and walked back into the living area.

He switched on the television, although he kept the

36

sound turned off. On-screen, a witch was being burned at the stake in agonized silence. He went across to the mir­rored drinks cabinet, took out a caballitos shot glass, and poured himself a slug of Herradura Silver tequila. He knocked it back in one and stood for a moment with his eyes watering before pouring himself another. It was made from 100 percent blue agave, one of the most expensive tequilas you could buy.

He could see that his answering machine was blinking red and he could guess who it was, but he didn't feel like an­swering it. He took his drink over to the window and looked out over Canal Walk and the James River, the water glisten­ing as black as oil, with a thousand lights dancing in it, yel­low and red and green.

He had moved to Canal Walk Lofts over a year ago, but in spite of all the pictures and personal clutter that he had brought with him he still felt as if he were a stranger, living without permission in somebody else's apartment. Come to that, he still felt as if he were living without permission in somebody else's life.

The walls were all painted gunmetal gray and the floor was shiny red hardwood, although it was badly scuffed in front of the chair that faced the television. The couch and the armchairs were upholstered in soft black leather, and there was a glass-and-chrome coffee table with dozens of overlapping rings on it where glasses and coffee mugs had stood. Amongst the rings stood a bronze statuette of an ec­static naked dancer, her hair flying out behind her; as well as an enamel-plated shield from the Metro Richmond Police for marksmanship; heaps of TV Guides and Guns & Ammo and Playboy and newspapers; an ashtray from the Jefferson Hotel; and a well-thumbed copy of Your Year in the Stars: Capricorn.

Along one wall ran a long black mahogany bookcase,

37

crammed with a mixture of John Grisham novels and tech­nical manuals for dismantling guns and rebuilding automo­biles and step-by-step guides to Mexican and southern cookery. At the far end were ten or eleven books on mysti­cism and life after death, including the biography of Edgar Cayce, the famous clairvoyant, and Zora Hurston, the an­thropologist who had investigated the zombie cult in Haiti.

On the wall above the bookcase hung a huge brightly colored print of a Dutch girl sitting in a field of scarlet tulips, wearing a snow-white bonnet and bright yellow clogs. Her stripy skirt was lifted and her legs were wide apart, her vulva as scarlet as the tulips. Next to it were more nudes, darker and moodier, and three etchings of a couple entwined together. But on the other side of the room, close to the window, there was a gallery of more than twenty pho­tographs framed in black, some of them color and some of them black-and-white. All of them showed the same dreamy-looking blonde with dark brown eyes and very long fine hair.

Decker, as he always did, raised his glass to her. "Another day in paradise, baby."

He drew the loosely woven drapes, and then he went through to the bedroom where his king-size bed remained exactly as he had left it that morning, the sheets twisted like the Indian rope trick and the pillows all punched out of shape. He had always been a restless sleeper, prone to night­mares, and the state of the bed was a silent but eloquent record of last night's journeys through the country of shad­ows—a country where faceless people murmured in his ears and strange white shapes fled ahead of him through endless arcades.

Beside the bed stood more photographs of the dreamy-looking blonde, one of them showing her arm in arm with

38

Decker on the pedestrian walkway under the Robert E. Lee Bridge, her right hand raised to keep the sun out of her eyes.

Decker stripped off his clothes, dropping them onto the bed, and went through to the white-tiled bathroom. He stepped into the shower and turned it on full-blast. For some reason the Maitland case had left him feeling very tired and discouraged. All homicides were messy and dis­gusting, and there were always loose ends and blind alleys and confusing evidence. On its own, the disappearance of the murder weapon wouldn't have worried him unduly. The circumstantial evidence against Jerry Maitland was over­whelming. But it was hard to imagine why he should have attacked his wife so frenziedly, and killed their unborn baby. He had a great job, an idyllic house, and everything in the world to look forward to. Unless he had violent schizo­phrenic tendencies that nobody had guessed at, there didn't seem to be any motive for his actions at all.

And then there was Sandra's So-Scary Man in gray. Gray hat, gray coat, and wings, whatever that meant. Decker didn't believe in ghosts and he didn't believe in reincarna­tion. After Cathy's death, he had wanted to, desperately, al­most to the point of madness. He had talked to dozens of mediums and clairvoyants and read everything he could about "psychic phenomena." Anything to touch Cathy again, anything to talk to her and smell her and wake up in the morning with her hair spread out on the pillow. Any­thing to tell her how sorry he was.

But after three months of sick leave and nearly a thou­sand dollars of savings wasted on seances and "spirit empa­thy sessions," he had come to accept that she was truly gone. He didn't quite know how it had happened. He had been walking through Hollywood Cemetery one afternoon, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was buried,

39

along with eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers, and he had realized how silent it was, apart from the traffic on Route 1 and the endless rushing of the James River rapids. There was nobody there. No spirits, no whispers. The dead were dead and they never came back.

One thing he had learned from his research into clairvoy­ance, however, was that some people were capable of faking occult phenomena. They could throw their voices, or make themselves temporarily invisible to those around them, or at least unnoticed. It was nothing supernatural, it was simply a trick, like stage magic, or hypnotism, or an optical illu­sion. Because of her mental disability, it was conceivable that Sandra had been unaffected by whatever gimmick the man in gray had employed to distract the attention of passersby. That was why—the more Decker thought about it—the more interested he was in seeing the figure that Sandra might draw.

He shampooed his hair with Fix and felt the suds sliding down his back. He was beginning to relax now. One more shot of tequila as a nightcap, and he was going to bed, and to sleep, and tonight with any luck he wouldn't have quite so many nightmares. He reached for his towel and climbed out of the shower.

As he did so, he thought he heard a clicking sound com­ing from the living area. He stood still and listened. Noth­ing. It must have been the air-conditioning. He dried himself and went back into the bedroom. He was opening his drawer to take out a clean pair of boxer shorts when he heard it again. Click—click-----click.

He stepped into his shorts and then stood perfectly still and listened. Almost half a minute passed. Then click click—click. And then a rattle.

It sounded as if there were somebody in the kitchen,

40

rather than the living area. Decker opened his closet door and took out his baseball bat. He just hoped that if it was an intruder, he hadn't noticed that a fully loaded Colt Ana­conda was hanging from the hat stand right outside the kitchen doorway.

Click—click. Decker eased the bedroom door open a little wider and then stepped out into the living area, keeping his back close to the wall. His holster was still where he had hung it up, thank God. But the odd thing was that the front door was still locked, and the security chain was still fastened.

He made his way across the wooden floor, trying not to make sticky noises with his warm feet. He reached the op­posite wall and flattened himself against it, breathing deeply to steady himself.

The clicking continued, intermittently. Then he heard something else, and his back prickled as if cockroaches were rushing down it. Singing. High-pitched, breathy singing. Quite tuneless, and the words were barely distinguishable. But it was singing and it was Cathy. She had always sung like that.

Decker felt as if the entire world were tilting underneath his feet. Cathy was dead. He had seen Cathy dead. He had convinced himself that ghosts didn't exist and spirits couldn't be summoned back and yet here she was, singing in his kitchen in the middle of the night. It gave him a feeling of dread far greater than any intruder could have inspired. He lifted the baseball bat and his hands were shaking so much that he had to lower it again. Besides, what was he go­ing to do, if it really was her? Hit her?

Decker took a sharp breath and stepped into the kitchen doorway. The singing abruptly stopped and there was no­body there. He stood there for a while, not knowing what to do. He cleared his throat and said, "Cathy? Are you here,

41

Cathy?" but of course there was no reply. He took another step forward, and sniffed, in the hope that he might be able to smell her, that distinctive flowery perfume she always wore, but there was no trace of it.

He peered around the corner of the kitchen toward the brightly lit countertop next to the sink. On top of his seasoned-oak chopping board there was a pattern of pale, glistening lumps. At first Decker couldn't understand what he was looking at, but with a growing sense of eeriness he realized that it was a face, with staring eyes and jagged teeth—not a real face, but a face that had been fashioned out of slices of raw chicken, with a pointed breastbone for a nose, two slices of banana for eyes, and teeth made from diced-up apple.

It was unsettlingly lifelike, and the way it was looking at him made him feel as if it were just about to speak. But who had created it, and why, and how? A small sharp knife lay beside the chopping board, but whoever had used it had completely vanished.

Decker paced slowly up and down the kitchen, waving his baseball bat from side to side, as if it might come into contact with somebody invisible. Again, he whispered, "Cathy? Are you here, sweetheart? Talk to me, Cathy." But there was still no reply, only the mournful hooting of a ship on the river.

He went back into the living area and checked behind the drapes. The windows were closed and locked, so nobody could have escaped by climbing out that way. Besides, it was a sixty-foot drop to the street. He went back to the bedroom and opened all of the closet doors. Nobody. He frowned down at the photo of Cathy beside the bed. "Was that you? Or am I going out of my mind?"

He returned to the kitchen. He stared at the chicken‑

42

meat face for a while but he had no idea what significance it had, if it had any significance at all. He thought of Jerry Maitland, saying, "There was nobody there . . . there was cutting and cutting but there was nobody there."

He wondered if he ought to call Hicks to take a look, but he decided against it. Hicks needed his sleep and besides—Decker didn't want to give the impression that he was losing his grip. He had seen it happen too many times before, detectives subtly falling apart. Their breakdowns were mostly caused by the steady erosion of suppressed grief, after one of their partners had been killed; or after their marriages had broken up, and they had lost custody of their children; or after they had been called out to one too many grotesquely mutilated bodies. They always thought that they were keeping their emotions under control, while all of their fellow officers could see that they were as brittle as an automobile whose bodywork had rusted right through to the paint.

Decker took his Polaroid camera out of the bookcase, loaded it with film, and took six or seven pictures of the kitchen counter. Then he cleared all the meat and fruit into the sink, and pushed them into the waste disposal. The knife he picked up by the tip and dropped into a plastic food bag.

He looked around the kitchen one more time. He cleared his throat and said, "Cathy, sweetheart, if what I heard was really you, why don't you give me a sign? Why don't you tell me why you're here? Why don't you let me see you for a minute? Why don't you let me touch you?"

He waited but there was no answer and no sign. Maybe

he was going crazy. Maybe he was simply overtired.

In the end he switched the lights off and went to bed.

* * *

43

As soon as he fell asleep the nightmares began. Nightmares more frightening than any he had ever had before.

He dreamed that he was struggling through thick, lacer­ating underbrush. It was nearly dark and he knew that he had to hurry. Off to his left he could see fires burning, and he could hear men shouting to each other.

The branches caught in his clothing and lashed against his face. His feet were bare and every step was prickly with briars. The fires began to leap up higher, and he could smell smoke on the wind, and hear the crackling of burning bushes.

He was shaking with exhaustion, but he knew that if he stopped for even a minute the fires would cut him off, and he also knew that there was somebody close behind him, somebody who wanted to do him serious harm. He looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see anybody, but he was sure that they were very close behind.

Somewhere ahead of him, in the gathering darkness, a hoarse voice called out, "Muster at the road, boys! Muster at the road or we're finished!"

He heard a rattling that sounded like rifle shots, and a man screaming. How could he muster at the road when he didn't even know where the road was? He couldn't see any­thing but densely tangled undergrowth and thornbushes.

He tried to go faster by leaping over the bushes in awk­ward galumphing bounds, but his face was ripped by the branches and he was terrified of having an eye torn out. He lifted one arm in front of his face to protect himself. His woolen mittens were snared by briars, and his fingers were scratched, but it was preferable to being blinded.

The fires were coming closer, and he felt gusts of furnace-like heat. Another man was screaming, and then another. Then he heard something else: a thick rustling noise, very

44

close behind him, very close. Somebody was catching up with him fast.

He turned around, and a huge figure in a dark cloak was almost on top of him. It came rushing toward him and it didn't stop, so that it collided with him. He found himself struggling in a cage of bones, trapped, unable to get free. The cloak closed around him and he was imprisoned in air­less darkness, desperately trying to disentangle himself from ribs and shoulder blades and knobbly vertebrae.

"Can't breathe!" he screamed. "Can't breathe!"

He twisted around and realized that he was lying on his bed with his sheet over his face, thrashing his arms and kicking his legs.

Panting, sweating, he sat up. He switched on the bedside light and he could see himself in the mirror that faced the end of the bed, pale-faced, with his hair sticking up like a cockerel. His throat was dry—almost as dry as if he really had been running away from a brushfire. He reached for the glass of water that he usually left on his nightstand, but to­night he had forgotten it. He said, "Shit," and swung his legs out of bed. It was then that he realized that his feet were lacerated. They were covered in dozens of small scratches, all the way up to his calves, and his sheets were spotted with blood.

More than that, there were several briars still sticking in his ankles.

Whoa, he thought. This is getting dangerously close to insan­ity. You can't catch briars in your feet from running through underbrush in a nightmare, no matter how vivid that night­mare might have been.

He put on his glasses and went through to the bathroom, hobbling a little. He switched on the light over the bath­room mirror. His face was scratched, too. There was a nasty

45

little cut on the side of his nose, and the skin on his right cheek had been torn in three diagonal stripes.

Pulling out a Kleenex, he carefully dabbed the scratches on his face. Then he sat down on the toilet seat and plucked the briars from out of his feet. He sprayed aftershave on the wounds because he didn't have any antiseptic, sucking in his breath when it stung.

He stayed in the bathroom for almost five minutes, won­dering if he ought to go back to bed. Like, what if he went back into the same nightmare and the brushfire caught up with him? He could be burned to death in his own bed. He had read about religious fanatics who had identified so strongly with the suffering of Christ that stigmata had opened in their feet and the palms of their hands, and their foreheads had appeared to be scratched by a crown of thorns. Maybe this was a similar kind of phenomenon.

At last he stood up and went back into the bedroom. He had to take control of this situation. He desperately needed to sleep, and he couldn't let his subconscious fears start ril­ing his life. "I'm not going crazy," he announced. "I'm prob­ably suffering from delayed grief and work-related stress, but I am definitely not going crazy." He paused, and then he said, "Shit, I'm talking to myself. How crazy is that?"

He eased himself back into bed, but this time he left the light on. It made him feel as if he were a child again, terri­fied of what might be hiding in the dark. When he was five or six, he had imagined that the parchment-colored lining. of his bedroom drapes was the skin of a tall, thin, mummi­fied man, and that as soon as the light was switched off, the mummy would unfold itself and stalk across the room, stilt-legged, to take out his eyes.

At about 3:30, he fell asleep again. He dreamed that he and Cathy were walking together through the Hollywood Cemetery. It was late evening and the sky was a grainy crim‑

46

son color. The crosses and urns and headstones looked like chess pieces in a complicated board game, and Decker was sure that when his back was turned they kept shifting their position. He kept trying to look at Cathy, but for some rea­son her face was always blurred and out of focus.

"What were you doing in the kitchen?" he asked her. His voice sounded oddly muffled.

"I was protecting you," she replied.

"Protecting me? Protecting me from what?"

"From Saint Barbara. Saint Barbara wants her revenge." "Saint Barbara? What the hell are you talking about? What I have ever done to upset Saint Barbara?"

"I don't want you to know. I don't want you to find out."

"Cathy, listen to me. Tell me that I'm not going crazy."

She said nothing, but turned away from him. He reached out to take hold of her shoulder, but she collapsed, like an empty bedsheet, and when he opened his eyes, that was all he had in his hand.

47

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning was sweltering and off to the east the sky was a dark coppery color, as if an electric storm were brewing off to the east, over the Richmond Battlefield. Decker went to Sausalito's Café on East Grace Street for coffee and scrambled eggs and sat facing the window, watching the passersby. For some reason that he couldn't explain, the world seemed to be altered, as if the streets downtown had been hurriedly dismantled and recon­structed during the night and some of the details hadn't been put back exactly as they should be. He had always thought that mailbox was on the opposite side of the inter­section, yet here it was, right in front of the window. Even the passersby looked unnatural, walking in a hurried, self-conscious way like extras on a movie set. Decker could have believed that he was still in a nightmare.

"More coffee, Decker?" Amy called, from behind the counter. As she did so, a young woman in an oddly shaped black beret looked in through the window and gave him a

48

knowing smile. He gave her a questioning look in return and mouthed, What?—but she turned away and disappeared into the crowds, as quickly and completely as if she had been made of nothing more than jigsaw pieces.

Jesus, Decker, you're definitely losing it.

Mayzie was waiting for him at headquarters.

"You rat, you didn't show," she complained, bustling after him into the elevator. "I waited for over a half hour and you didn't show. Ha! As if I believed that you really would."

"I told you, sweetheart, I'm all tied up with the Maitland case. We had witnesses to interview, evidence to look at. Things dragged on much later than I thought they would."

"You could at least have called me."

"I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry."

"Oh, you're sorry. Look at your face, all scratches. Who gave you those?"

"I tripped over. I fell in a bush."

"Really? Whose bush? I'd like to know."

"Mayzie, I'm sorry-sorry-sorry. How about lunch? I'll meet you right here in the lobby at twelve."

"You're a rat, do you know that? I don't even know if I want a child if it's going to have you as a father."

"Well, that makes two of us."

"Rat."

"I'll meet you here at twelve, okay? Don't be late, will you?"

He left her in the elevator and walked along the corridor to his office. Hicks was already there, talking on the tele­phone. Hicks jabbed his finger toward the waiting room. Through the glass division Decker could see Eunice Plum­mer and Sandra sitting side by side. Eunice was reading an old copy of The Carytown Guide while Sandra was playing some sort of game with her fingers.

49

Decker took off his sandy-colored coat and dropped it over the back of his chair. His desk was heaped with papers ° and files and scribbled memos, as well as crumpled-up paper napkins and three Styrofoam cups of cold coffee. But there was also a brass-framed photograph of Cathy. He had taken it the day before she was killed, in a corn field out on Route 5, in Charles County. She was wearing a frayed straw hat that cast a ragged shadow over her face, and she was chew­ing a stalk of grass. My beautiful hayseed.

"What were you doing in my nightmares last night?" he asked her, out loud.

Hicks put down the phone and said, "You okay, Lieu­tenant?"

"Sure, I'm fine. Didn't sleep too good, that's all." "Your face is all scratched up."

Decker touched the scab on his nose. "Yeah . . . kind of an altercation with the neighbor's pet cat."

"You should get shots for that. You don't want to get, what is it, rabies?"

Decker didn't answer. He didn't want to have to tell Hicks that it hadn't been a cat, but a briar, and not only that, an imaginary briar.

Hicks said, "I was just talking to the ME. She's pretty sure that Mrs. Maitland's injuries were caused by a double-edged swordlike weapon, approximately two and a half feet long. She suggested a bayonet, something like that."

"A bayonet? Jesus."

"I was thinking of drawing up a list of all the places in Richmond that sell bayonets. Like gun shops and military curio stores. Antique markets, too. If we can establish that Maitland actually owned a bayonet, then it won't matter so much that we haven't been able to find it."

"That's good thinking, Hicks. Why don't you start with Billy Joe Bennett at the Rebel Yell on West Cary Street? Be‑

50

lieve me—if Robert E. Lee had ever had half as much ord­nance as Billy Joe Bennett, he would have won the Civil War in a week."

"Okay, Lieutenant. Right on it." Hicks lifted his coat off the peg beside his desk and picked up his notebook.

"Hey, hey, slow down, sport," Decker said. "You don't need to take this weapon thing so personal. You con­ducted a thorough search, you couldn't find it, ergo it wasn't there. Obviously it's going to help us if we can pro­duce the weapon in court, and prove that Maitland used it to kill his wife, but it's not the end of the world if we can't."

"I just like to have things neatly wrapped up," Hicks ad­mitted. "I mean—how could a two-foot bayonet totally dis­appear? It isn't logical."

"All right, Mr. Spock," Decker said. But even as he said it, he thought about the face carved out of slices of raw chicken and banana, lying on his chopping board, and what was logical about that, or even sane?

He ran his hand through his hair, prinking up his pom­padour. "I guess I'd best go see what my visitors want. By the way, how's your wife liking it here in the city?"

"Good, fine. She's okay."

"She doesn't miss Fredericksburg?"

"Some. I think she misses her friends most."

"Well, that's natural. You ought to bring her out one eve­ning. . . . I know a couple of girls she'll really get on with. Does she like Mexican food? We could go to La Siesta."

Hicks shrugged. "I'll ask her. She's never been much for socializing."

"In that case, I insist that she comes. I can't have my partner's wife feeling lost and abandoned in the big city."

Hicks gave him a tight, unappreciative smile. "I guess not. Thanks. I'll talk to her about it."

51

* * *

He rapped loose-knuckled on the door of the waiting room. Eunice Plummer looked up and beamed at him, and so did Sandra.

"Sorry I kept you waiting so long."

"That's quite all right. Sandra finished her drawing at seven o'clock last night and she's been dying to show it to you ever since. She was up at six, all dressed up in her best frock and ready to go."

"I could have sent somebody to collect it. Saved you a journey."

"I wanted to show you myself," put in Sandra.

"Well, Sandra, I really appreciate that. It's people like you who make our job a whole lot more satisfying."

"I want to help you find that So-Scary Man. He looked like this." With that, Sandra lowered her chin and frowned, and then she made her eyes roll up into her head, so that only the whites showed.

"Sandra!" Eunice Plummer protested. "You mustn't make faces! If the wind changes, you'll stay like that!"

Sandra clapped her hands in excitement. "He looked just like that! Look at my drawing—look!"

She handed Decker a rolled-up piece of art paper. Decker sat down next to her and unrolled it. He had expected a stick person in a hat. What she had actually drawn was a highly detailed pencil rendition of the front of 4140 Davis Street, with its iron railings and its Doric-pillared porch and even its carriage lamp. She had included every single brick, and shaded everything. She had even included the decora­tive lace curtains behind the front parlor window.

"She has a wonderful memory," Eunice Plummer said, proudly.

Decker shook his head in admiration. "Not just that, she's

52

very talented. I know some professional artists who can't draw anything like as good as this."

Sandra pointed to the tall figure standing on the porch. "That's him. That's the scary man."

Her impersonation of the So-Scary Man's face had been disturbingly close to the face she had drawn. He was very tall. He was wearing what looked like a wide-brimmed slouch hat, with straggly black feathers around it, and his beard was black and wild. But it was his eyes that made him look so terrifying. They had no pupils, only whites, like the eyes of a boiled codfish, and yet they had a stare of concen­trated fury, as if he were calling down every curse in the world on whoever he was looking at.

"You're right." Decker nodded. "He is pretty scary, isn't he?"

The So-Scary Man was wearing a long gray overcoat with a cape, and now Decker understood what Sandra had meant by "wings." The overcoat was unbuttoned at the front to re­veal a long scabbard hanging from the man's belt. He wore dark britches and knee-length leather boots.

Decker studied the drawing for a long time. Then he asked Sandra, "You saw the So-Scary Man—but do you think he saw you?"

Sandra thought about that and then said, "Yes . . . I think so. He was looking right at me."

"Could that be dangerous?" Eunice Plummer asked, real­izing what Decker was asking.

"I don't know. This is a very weird situation. This draw­ing—this likeness—it's totally amazing. I wish all of our witnesses could draw like this, we wouldn't need computer composites. But the fact remains that Sandra was the only person who saw this guy, nobody else. We've interviewed over thirty people who were walking along Davis Street at the same time you were, and not one of them reported see‑

53

ing anybody who looked like this ... and, let's face it, he's pretty darn distinctive, isn't he?"

Eunice Plummer took hold of Sandra's hand and gave it a protective squeeze. "What are you going to do?" she asked, worriedly.

"I'm going to assume for now that he was real. I have to say that it's very unlikely that anybody was able to walk out of the Maitland house without being seen by any other passersby, but it's not one hundred percent impossible. I'm going to assign an officer to keep an eye on Sandra for the next few days, just to be on the safe side."

"You don't think that this man would try to hurt her?"

"I don't think she's in any real danger, Ms. Plummer, to tell you the truth. But I'm going to issue this drawing to the media this afternoon, so that if he does exist he's pretty soon going to find out that he's a suspect. If he's innocent, he'll most likely come forward so that we can eliminate him from our inquiries. If he's guilty of any involvement in Mrs. Mait­land's murder, the chances are that he'll shave off his beard and go on the lam, if he hasn't done it already. But if he's aware that Sandra was the only person who actually saw him . . . well, like I say, there's no harm in being careful."

He turned to Sandra and said, "You turn on your TV to­night, Sandra, and you'll see your drawing on the news."

Sandra smiled and gave him an unexpected high five.

Decker took them down to the lobby. "I want to thank you again, Sandra. I'll make sure that you get a special police badge for this."

"Thank you," Sandra said. "I hope you catch the So-Scary Man."

"Sure, well, me too."

Outside, there was a deafening collision of thunder. San‑

54

dra raised her head and said, "Something's going wrong, isn't it?"

"No, no. That's just an electric storm. Nothing to be afraid of."

Sandra shook her head. "I don't mean that. Something's going wrong."

"I don't understand what you mean. What's going wrong?"

"1 don't know. Not yet."

"She gets feelings sometimes," Eunice Plummer ex­plained. "Premonitions, I suppose you'd call them. She had a very bad feeling the night before her father died."

Decker put his arm around Sandra's rounded shoulders. "Don't you worry, Sandra. Everything's going to be fine. Come through to the garage and I'll have a squad car take you and your mommy home."

55

CHAPTER SEVEN

As he came jogging along the street, his new Nike sneak­ers slapping on the sidewalk, George Drewry saw lightning flicker in the distance, over the city center. He turned into his driveway and bent over double, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. He was still bent double when the thun­der reached him, and he thought that it sounded like dis­tant cannon fire. This is what it must have sounded like here in Highland Springs in 1864, when Sherman was ad­vancing from Williamsburg.

The front door opened and Jean came out, in a bright green tracksuit, her white hair wound up in rollers. "George? Are you all right?"

George slowly straightened his back. He was a big man, six feet three inches, and since his retirement from the army last August he had put on at least twenty pounds. His bald­ing, sunburned head was tied with a red bandanna and he was wearing a khaki T-shirt and a drooping pair of gray jog­ging pants, both drenched in sweat. He limped toward the

56

house, wiping his forehead with his hairy forearm. "All this exercise is going to be the death of me, do you know that?"

"Dr. Gassman told you to keep in shape, didn't he?"

"I know, but he didn't actually specify what shape, did he? I mean, pear-shaped is a shape, isn't it?"

George limped inside, with Jean following him. He was sixty-two years old, with a long face and wobbly jowls, and very large ears, like a mournful dog. He went into the kitchen, opened up the icebox and took out a large bottle of mineral water.

"How about a Caesar salad?" Jean asked, watching him gulp.

"How about some fried chicken and gravy?"

"You know what Dr. Gassman said about your arteries."

"Dr. Gassman is a miserable bastard who is doing every­thing possible to make me as miserable as him. Why can't I enjoy my life once in a while?"

"What's the point in enjoying your life if you're dead?"

George put the water bottle back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "All right, Caesar salad, but don't be stingy with the ham."

He walked along the corridor to the bathroom. The walls were covered with military memorabilia—framed photo­graphs of Wofford's brigade during the Civil War, engrav­ings of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, as well as three muskets and pennants and badges from TRADOC--the Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe. George had been a soldier since the age of nineteen, ending his career as a major at the Office of the Command Histo­rian, which kept records of U.S. Army history dating back to the earliest colonial militia. He had even written a short history book himself—The Boys In Gray, about the Regulars who fought the British at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane.

In the bathroom he stripped off his bandanna and his

57

T-shirt and jogging pants and voluminous Bugs Bunny boxer shorts. He was damned if all this galloping around the neighborhood was doing anything more than making him look like a prize asshole. He always felt like shit when he came back from a run, and he wasn't even allowed to have a beer. He looked at himself in the mirror and his face was crimson.

"Look at you," he told himself. "You're no damn good to anyone. Not even you."

He climbed into the shower and turned on the faucets. He knew that Jean was only trying to take care of him, but her endless fussing was like nettle rash. It was bad enough, not having an office to go to anymore, and no staff to order around. He had always imagined that he would relish his re­tirement, reading and fishing and giving occasional well-received lectures on military campaigns. But when he had opened his eyes on that very first morning and realized that he wasn't going to be dressing in uniform anymore, and that he wouldn't be saluted by everyone he met, he had felt as if he were rendered impotent during the night.

Now he spent his days moping around the house, while Jean pursued him from room to room with the Hoover. "You should take up golf."

"Golf is for people who don't have anything else to do." "But you don't have anything else to do."

"I know, but I'm damned if I'm going to advertise it."

Far from bringing him peace and self-fulfillment, retire­ment had taken away the only thing that had made him proud of himself. He felt so useless sometimes that it made him gasp for breath, as if he were going to start sobbing.

He was soaping his chest when he felt something cold sliding down his left inside leg. Looking down, he saw that he was bleeding from a long thin cut that ran all the way from his testicles to the side of his knee. Blood was already

58

running down his calf, mingled with foam and water, and swirling into the shower tray.

How the hell ... ?

George reached out of the shower cubicle for his towel. He could tell that the cut must be deep as well as long, be­cause the blood was a rich arterial color, and it was flowing out in thick, warm surges.

"Jean!" he shouted. "Jean, I need some help here!"

He tugged his towel off the rail and wound it around his thigh as tightly as he could. All the same, it was soaked scar­let in a matter of seconds. "Jean!" he called. "Jean, I've cut myself!"

He lifted his right hand toward the faucets to turn off the water, but as he did so he felt an intense slice across his knuckles, and another cut appeared, so vicious that it al­most severed his little finger. He cried out in bewilderment more than pain, and thrust his hand into his mouth, so that it was filled up with the metallic taste of fresh blood.

Then, with terrible swiftness, his left hand was cut, too, so that he dropped the towel that he was holding against his thigh. The towel blocked up the drain, and it took only a few seconds before the shower tray was brimming with blood and water.

George staggered sideways. He felt giddy already, as if he had just climbed off a carnival roundabout. The inside of the shower cubicle suddenly went dark, with swarming pin­pricks of light. "Jean, I need you!" he shouted, but his voice sounded as if it were coming from the end of a very long pipe.

He felt a cut across the bridge of his nose, and then three more cuts on his shoulders. He slid down the wall until he was on his knees, leaving a wide streak of blood on the pale green tiles. The water pelted into his face and almost blinded him.

59

His back was cut in a series of diagonal slices that went right through to his shoulder blades and his ribs. He actually felt the blade sliding against the bone. He flailed around with his bleeding hands, trying to stop his invisible assailant from cutting him anymore, but there was nobody there, and all he succeeded in doing was decorating the shower cubicle in a ghastly scarlet parody of an action painting.

"Jean," he whispered.

With a soft pop, the point of a blade broke his skin just above his pubic hair. There was a moment's hesitation, and then the blade itself was pushed in deep through the layers of subcutaneous fat and into his stomach muscles. He cried out, "No-no-no-no-no!" because the blade was so cold and the pain was too much for him to bear. He tried to climb to his feet, his bloody hands sliding frantically against the tiles, and he almost succeeded. But then he slipped and fell down onto his knees again, and as he did so the blade cut his belly wide open all the way to his breastbone, where it stuck for a second before it was pulled out.

His intestines slithered out of his stomach cavity and piled up into a sloppy heap in the overflowing shower tray. He looked down at them, all yellowish and glistening and streaked with blood, and wondered if he should try to gather them up and stow them back in. He had seen a ma­rine try to do it in Dong Ha. But his large intestine was sliced in half, and maybe it wasn't worth it.

He leaned one shoulder against the side of the shower. The best thing to do was sleep for a while, and then try. All that jogging around the block had made him feel so tired. That goddamn Dr. Gassman would be the death of him. He closed his eyes for a while, while the warm shower water poured into his face and filled his opened-up belly with a hollow gurgling noise. It reminded him of summer rain, gur­gling down the gutters.

60

CHAPTER EIGHT

A different nurse was on duty when Decker and Hicks ar­rived at the hospital to question Jerry Maitland—a severe fortyish woman with a World War Two helmet of iron-gray hair. "I don't want my patient agitated," she warned them. "He's in a very depressed state, and we wouldn't like to ex­acerbate his condition, would we?"

Decker laid his hand on her shoulder and smiled. "Do you like Mexican food?" he asked her.

Jerry was sitting up watching the news channel with an untouched lunch tray in front of him, pale chicken salad with watery tomatoes and lime-green Jell-O. Decker sat on the end of the bed and helped himself to one of Jerry's saltines. "How's it going, Jerry?" he said, snapping the cracker in half. "I brought my partner, Sergeant Hicks, to see you."

Jerry glanced at them both but said nothing. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen and it was obvious that he had been crying.

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"Had any more thoughts about the knife, Jerry?" Decker asked,

"I told you. There was no knife."

"Okay . . . how about this? Did you ever see a guy with a beard skulking around your neighborhood?"

"A beard?"

"That's it. Tall guy, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and one of those coats with a cape over the shoulders? Ever see any­body who looked like that?"

Jerry shook his head.

"Show him the picture, Hicks," Decker said. Hicks pro­duced a folded-up copy of Sandra's drawing and held it up in front of Jerry's face.

"Not the kind of guy you'd forget in a hurry, huh?" Decker asked him.

"That's the front of our house," Jerry said, perplexed.

"That's right. And the person who drew this picture says that she saw this guy coming out of your front door round about the time that your wife was killed."

"I never saw him before in my life."

"He couldn't have been hiding in your house without you knowing it?"

"How could he? I mean, look at him. Besides that, Alison was killed right in front of my eyes and there was nobody there."

"You're totally sure about that?" Hicks asked. "You couldn't have suffered a blackout or nothing like that?"

"I was losing a lot of blood and I was feeling pretty faint. But I'm sure I didn't lose consciousness. I saw Alison fall down, but I swear to God there was nobody there."

"You realize you're not exactly helping your own defense?"

"I don't need a defense. I know that I was the only other person in the house but I didn't do it. It was like she was at­tacked by somebody invisible."

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Hicks took out his notebook. "You interested in military memorabilia at all, Mr. Maitland?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know . . . guns, knives, battle flags, that kind of stuff." Jerry shook his head.

"You've never owned, like, a sword, or a bayonet?"

"No, of course not. But this man in this picture . . . he's carrying some kind of a sword, isn't he?"

"That's right," Decker said. "It's a bayonet, as a matter of fact, and our medical examiner is of the opinion that your Alison was killed by a very similar weapon."

Jerry stared at him. "So it's possible that he might have done it? Even though I didn't see him?"

"That's what we're trying to establish. The only problem is, there were more than forty people in the immediate vicinity of your house when this guy was walking out of the front door, and only one of them saw him."

"Maybe they just didn't notice him."

"Dressed like that? In broad daylight?"

"I guess so," Jerry admitted. "But it doesn't make any sense at all, does it?"

Decker stood up. "You're right. It doesn't. So we're still left with the circumstantial evidence that you killed Alison. You realize that if you admit it, the DA will go much easier on you."

"Especially if you remember what you did with the weapon," Hicks put in.

Jerry shook his head even more emphatically. "I can't ad­mit it, because I didn't do it. I never owned a bayonet and I never touched a hair of Alison's head."

"Okay," Decker said. "The doctors say that you'll be fit enough to go in front of the judge on Tuesday. In the mean­time, you know how to get in touch with me if you have a sudden revelation."

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"You're going to look for this man, though?"

"Oh, sure. We have to. Elimination of suspects, no matter how unlikely."

Jerry frowned at the drawing again. "He reminds me of somebody. I can't think who."

"You think you might have seen him before?"

"I don't know . . . there's just something familiar about him. I can't think what it is."

"Well, if it comes to mind . . ."

"Sure," Jerry said.

They left the room. "What do you think?" Decker asked Hicks.

"I think he did it. I'm sure he did it."

"What about the So-Scary Man?"

"Didn't exist. Come on, Lieutenant, Sandra's mentally challenged. I know she draws good, but a good drawing isn't evidence, is it?"

"Yeah, you're right," Decker agreed. "It's just that—why the hell did he do it?"

As they walked past the nurses' station, the helmet-haired nurse called out, "Lieutenant!"

"Yes? Oh, I'm sorry, nurse. We're through with Mr. Mait­land for now."

"Oh, that's all right. I just wanted you to know that I do like Mexican food. In fact, I like it very much."

Decker looked at Hicks in desperation but all Hicks could do was grin.

"What's your name?" Decker asked her.

"Marion."

"Okay, Marion. Next time I call by, I'll bring you my recipe for cheese empanadas."

64

CHAPTER NINE

They were driving back to headquarters when Decker's cell phone played Beethoven.

"Martin."

"Decker? It's Rudisill. The captain wants you over at 2024 Laburnum Street, just off Nine Mile Road. Like, you know, instantly."

"Want to tell me why?"

"It looks like your invisible guy has been at it again. Some old coot's been gutted like a salmon."

Decker said, "On our way," and switched on his siren and flashing lights.

"Whoo," Hicks said, slapping his armrest.

Decker U-turned the Mercury in the middle of Broad Street, its tires squittering, and headed east. "Did I tell you that I was going to be a father?" he asked Hicks.

They stepped cautiously into the bathroom where the forensic team were already at work, waddling around in

65

white Tyvek suits and taking tissue samples and footprints and measuring the smears of blood on the walls of George Drewry's shower cubicle.

Decker took a long look inside the shower. George Drewry's eyes were still half open, as if he were right on the point of nodding off to sleep. A fly settled on his heaped-up intestines and one of the forensic team flapped it away.

Decker turned back to Hicks and Hicks had his hand pressed over his nose and mouth. There was nothing guar­anteed to bring up your breakfast more than the sweet smell of human insides.

Decker looked around the white-tiled floor, which was decorated with blood, like blotchy crimson roses. "How many sets of footprints?" he asked Lieutenant Bryce, who was kneeling on the floor beside the toilet bowl, painstakingly dipping Q-tips into one of the gradually congealing petals.

"Only one, as far as I can tell," she said. "Major Drewry's wife."

"Major Drewry?"

"That's right. Fort Monroe, TRADOC, retired."

They left the bathroom and went back to the living room, where Cab was talking to the medical examiner, Erin Malkman. She was a handsome blond woman with a strong chin, deep-set eyes, and lips that were so full and glossy that they always looked to Decker as if she were halfway through eating an overripe apricot. Her Tyvek suit was half unzipped and she was tugging off her protective gloves.

"Hi, Erin. How's the meat trade these days?"

"Hello, Martin. Haven't seen you in a while."

"Oh, I've been around."

"I'm sure you have.

He gave her a tight, humorless smile. "So what's the pic­ture here?"

"I was just telling Captain Jackson that Major Drewry's

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wounds are distinctly different from those that were in­flicted on Alison Maitland. They're triangular, and they were probably caused by a large blade that was sharp on one side and serrated on the other."

"Bowie knife?"

"Something of that order. I've prepared some profiles of Alison Maitland's entry wounds and of course I'll be doing the same for Major Drewry."

"Bryce said there was only one set of footprints in the bathroom—Mrs. Drewry's."

"That's right," Cab said. "Major Drewry had been out jog­ging . . . he came in and went directly to the bathroom to take a shower. When he didn't reappear after ten minutes, Mrs. Drewry went in to see why he was taking so long, and that's when she found him."

"She didn't see anybody?"

"Nope. We have some similarities with the Maitland killing here . . . no evidence of any intruder, no murder weapon, no witnesses. But, I don't know ... with Gerald Maitland in custody, my opinion is that we're probably looking at a copycat."

"What about Mrs. Drewry? Is she a suspect?"

"Are you kidding me? You should see her. She had blood on her hands and feet, but that was only consistent with go­ing into the bathroom and finding Major Drewry's body."

"Where is she now?"

"Next door, with her neighbor."

"We'd better go talk to her then."

Erin said, "I'll start on the autopsy as soon as I get the body into the lab. I should be able to give you a preliminary report by midday tomorrow."

"Well, I thank you, kind medical examiner."

Erin didn't say anything, but then she didn't have to, be­cause she and Decker understood each other only too well.

67

Eighteen months ago they had both used each other—Decker to recover from his grief for Cathy, and Erin to get over a protracted and nasty affair with a city official called Simon who used to beat her. After two and a half months together Decker had turned up at her apartment one after­noon to find her with two black eyes. She had spent the previous night with her city official, and her city official had made doubly sure that Decker knew about it.

As they left the Drewry house, Cab said, "This case gives me dyspepsia."

"Relax, Captain, there has to be some explanation. Somebody killed Major Drewry whether that somebody was seen by anybody or not."

"It still makes my stomach hurt. Listen—I've called a news conference for four o'clock and I want you back at headquarters by two-thirty to give me an update. We can't let this one get out of hand, public-relations-wise. You see that headline about the Maitland killing? Homicide Squad Chase Their Own Shadows. I don't want no more b.s. like that."

They crossed the lawn toward the next-door neighbors' house. There was a clamor of shouted questions from the gathered reporters, and a blizzard of flash photography, but Cab gave them nothing more than a dismissive wave of his hand. "Goddamn media. They give me a pain in the ass."

"Have we released that drawing yet?"

"No, I had a talk with Major Greaves and we decided against it."

"What? What do you mean you decided against it?"

Cab dragged out his handkerchief and blew his nose. "Think about it, Decker. The only person who saw this character was mentally challenged. Nobody else saw him, not even her own mother, who was standing right next to

68

her, and to whom she actually pointed this imaginary char­acter out. Even if we could find a guy who looked like her drawing, Sandra's evidence would never stand up in court.

"Major Greaves agrees with me that it's in everybody's best interests if we quietly forget about it. Ours, and Sandra's."

"So we're not even going to look for this guy?"

"He walked through the door without opening it? A door that was locked and chained on the inside, and the para­medics had to kick down? The house was a bloodbath but he didn't leave a single footprint or fingerprint? Come on, Decker."

"What happened here then, at the Drewrys' house? Don't tell me that Major Drewry committed suicide. What with? A bowie knife, which we can't find, any more than we could find the bayonet that killed Alison Maitland?"

"I don't know, Decker, for Christ's sake. Don't make me irritable. Like you say, there has to be an explanation and it's your job to find it."

"I want that drawing released."

"No, Decker. We have a watertight case against Gerald Maitland and I'm not going to jeopardize it by making it look as if we're searching for another suspect. This ain't The Fugitive."

They found Jean Drewry on the shady verandah at the back of the house, sitting with her neighbor on a flowery-cushioned couch. The electric storm had passed over now, although it was still grumbling and complaining out over Powhatan County. In spite of the humidity, Jean Drewry was wrapped in a thick maroon shawl. Her neighbor was a plump woman in pink ski pants. She looked up sharply as Decker and Hicks came out of the house.

"Can't this wait?"

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"I'm sorry, ma'am. But I have to ask Mrs. Drewry one or two questions just to help us get a handle on this thing."

Jean Drewry was very white, as if her face were powdered with flour. "Is George gone yet?" she asked. "Have they taken him away?"

"The forensic people are going to need a couple more hours. But they'll move him as soon as they can."

"It's his pride, you see?" Jean Drewry said. "He wouldn't like people to see him like that."

"Mrs. Drewry, I can assure you that your George will be treated with the very greatest of respect," Decker assured her, thinking of Erin Malkman taking out her circular saw and cutting off the top of Major Drewry's skull, so that she could weigh his brain. He sat down on a wickerwork chair close to her, while Hicks perched on the verandah railing behind him. At the end of the garden there was a row of bee­hives and the afternoon hummed with steamy heat and bees.

"You were in the house when George came back from his run?"

"Yes. I was making us a salad. He's supposed to have salad, because of his arteries."

"You were in the house the whole time he was out?" "Yes, except when I went out into the yard to take down my washing."

"Was the back door unlocked?"

"Yes, it was. But I was in the kitchen the whole time, and I can see right down the corridor. Nobody could have gotten into the bathroom. It's just not possible."

"When George arrived home, did you open the front door for him?"

"Of course."

"So for a very short time, you couldn't see down the corri­dor?"

"Only for one or two minutes."

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Hicks jotted that down. "One or two minutes is a long time, ma'am."

"Yes, but you see, nobody came out of the bathroom."

That afternoon, Hicks and Banks and six uniformed officers went knocking on doors all around the Drewrys' house, ask­ing their neighbors if they had seen anybody or anything suspicious. They were greeted at every door by "sorry, Offi­cer, no," and shaken heads. Decker went back to headquar­ters and sent an e-mail of Sandra's drawing to every police division in the city, as well as the state police in Chester­field. He also asked the duty secretary to print out two hun­dred photocopies.

He met Officer Wekelo in the corridor. "Show this around. Anybody's seen a guy looking like this, there's a fifty in it."

"What's with the Ping-Pong ball eyes?" Wekelo asked.

"How should I know, grasshopper? Just find him for me."

He pushed aside all the clutter on his desk and started to make comparative notes about the Maitland killing and the Drewry murder. The assailant in both cases had been com­pletely invisible. He had entered his victims' houses unseen, and in the case of the Maitlands, without even opening a locked door or window. He had killed without a visible weapon and left without leaving a single physical trace of his having been there. However eager Cab was to bring Jerry Maitland to trial, Decker thought it much more likely that there was only one assailant, and that he had carried out both killings, and that he wasn't Jerry Maitland. Maybe he had used a bayonet for one and a bowie knife for the other, but most gun and knife fanatics owned a wide assort­ment of weapons. He had once arrested a Vietnam vet for holding up a convenience store with a switchblade knife in one hand and a scimitar in the other. Couldn't make up his mind if he was James Dean or Sinbad the Sailor.

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No—unlike Cab, Decker was more interested in finding out what was similar between Maitland and Drewry, rather than what was different. As yet, there was no apparent mo­tive for either murder, and no apparent connection between the two victims. But Decker had been in the business long enough to know that there was no such thing as a random killing. "Random" was a term that senior officers used when they really meant "We already have one reasonably likely suspect in custody and I don't want to spend any more of my overtime budget looking for somebody else."

He was sketching out a floor plan of George Drewry's house when Cab came in. "Where are we at?" he wanted to know. "I've got this goddamn media conference in ten minutes."

Decker scratched his ear with his pencil. "We're at square zilch, that's where we're at. But I guess you could tell the media that we're actively pursuing several promising leads and we're confident of an early arrest."

"We are? What promising leads?"

"You're the captain, you tell me."

Cab suddenly lifted up a crumpled sheet of paper he was clutching in his hand. "By the way, what the Sam Hill is this? I thought I made it clear that we weren't going to re­lease this drawing. They're all over the building. They're even pinned up on the notice boards. This guy is a figment of a mentally retarded girl's imagination and we are offi­cially not looking for him."

"I just thought the team ought to know who it is we're not officially looking for. You know—in case they see him, and officially try to arrest him."

"You and myrtle. You both make my nose run."

"You'll be out on the lake tomorrow."

"I wish. Weekend leave is canceled, because of this." Decker said, "Oh?" Then, "Oh." No dessert, then. Not this weekend, anyhow.

72

CHAPTER TEN

He was on his way to the men's room when Mayzie came strutting along the corridor toward him.

"Don't be late?" she demanded. "Don't be late? It's nearly four and you were supposed to meet me at twelve."

"Mayzie, for Christ's sake, I'm dealing with two very com­plicated homicides here."

"I know. I know you're busy. But all I'm asking for is five minutes. This is my life we're talking about here. This is your baby's life."

"Mayzie . . . I know I've let you down but I really don't have time for this."

"Well, make time for it."

"Do you mind if I freshen up first?"

He pushed open the door of the men's room but Mayzie followed him.

"Hey, this is the men's room."

"Don't be sexist. I just want to know where I stand with you, how serious you are."

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"How serious I am? About what?"

"About us. About you and me. Come on, Decker, we've been seeing each other for three and a half months now. I could be carrying your child. I think I deserve to know where I stand, don't you?"

Decker raised both hands in surrender. "Mayzie, I can't tell a lie. I like you, I think you're a gorgeous girl. But you know what I'm like. I've got a very short span of attention when it comes to emotional relationships. I'm not looking for anything long-term. And I'm certainly not looking for fatherhood."

Mayzie wrapped her arms around his neck, and pushed him back against the door of one of the stalls. "That's your defense mechanism talking, that's all. You lost Cathy, you're scared to commit to anybody else in case you lose them, too. Well, let me tell you, Decker, I love you and you won't lose me, ever. I promise."

Decker tried to pry himself free, but Mayzie forced him right back into the stall, so that he stumbled and sat down on the toilet seat. "Come on, Mayzie, for Christ's sake."

She gripped his shoulders and stared intently into his eyes. "Tell me you don't love me, go on. Tell me you don't think I'm the sexiest girl you ever went out with. Remember that afternoon at the Brandermill Inn? Remember what I did for you then?"

"Mayzie—"

She kissed his forehead. Then she kissed his nose and his cheeks and his eyes and his lips. He tried to stand up but she pushed him back down, kissing his ears and his neck and pulling at the buttons of his shirt.

"Mayzie—"

But at that moment, they heard the men's room door open, and voices. Mayzie pushed the door shut behind her

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and shot the catch. Decker tried to stand up again, but she pressed her finger over her lips and said, "Shh!"

Decker was about to protest when he heard Major Bruscow say, "I'm sorry, I can't agree with that operational study at all. We just don't have the manpower to have all of those locations under surveillance at one time."

"Okay . . . I'll talk to the chief about it. But I have to warn you that she's pretty set on making changes." That was Acting Deputy Chief Prescott.

Shit, Decker thought. With two senior officers standing at the urinals with their zippers open, there was no way that he could come barging out of the toilet stall with Mayzie Shifflett in tow.

Mayzie kissed him again and again and he tried to push her away, but her hands seemed to be everywhere. She took hold of his zipper and tugged it open in three sharp tugs, and then wriggled her hand inside his pants.

"No," he whispered. "I'll meet you later, I promise. We'll talk. We'll go to bed. We'll make love."

"I don't believe you," she whispered back.

She levered his penis out of his shorts and in spite of his annoyance it began to stiffen. She rubbed it slowly up and down, digging her square-tipped artificial fingernails into it, and kept on kissing his nose and his eyes and his lips.

"You cannot do this," he hissed, but she wouldn't stop.

Acting Deputy Chief Prescott let out a grunting noise, as if he were shaking himself. "The real problem we're facing is recruitment. We're still getting plenty of applications but sixty-five percent of them we can't accept. They can hardly read, some of them, and they have no idea of public service. I saw one application last week that said 'I want to be a cop because I can't afford my own car."

Decker heard the faucets running. Mayzie slowly went

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down on her knees, even though he struggled to stop her. She took the plum-colored head of his penis into her mouth, and licked it around and around. Then she lowered her head and took it deep down into her throat. He gripped her shoulders and it took all his self-control not to groan.

Mayzie sucked and sucked, and as she did so she reached around with one hand and unclipped the tortoiseshell bar­rette that held her French pleat in place. She gave a quick shake of her head and her blond hair tumbled free. She started to suck even more forcefully, and to bite him with every suck.

"Mayzie—" he hissed, but she was determined to prove that he wanted her. Determined.

Major Bruscow started washing his hands, too. "I need to go over our vacation arrangements. It looks as if we're going to have to do some juggling, what with these latest two homicides."

"Who have you got on those?"

"Martin."

"Too many hunches and not enough homework, that's what I always think about him."

"I don't know . . . he's a lateral thinker, and that's what we need on cases like these."

"Lateral, huh! More like prone."

Mayzie struggled one hand into Decker's pants and started to tug at his scrotum. Once or twice she made him wince, and he was forced to bite his lip. How much longer were Bruscow and Prescott going to spend preening themselves? Mayzie was probing the opening in his penis with the stiff­ened tip of her tongue and he wasn't far away from a climax.

"Mayzie, please—"

Mayzie lifted her head up and swept the hair away from her face.

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Only it wasn't Mayzie. It was Cathy, with her eyes closed. Decker jerked back in shock, so that he was jabbed in the shoulder blade by the cistern handle.

Cathy opened her eyes and gave him a wide, slow smile, the same languid smile that she always used to give him when she opened her eyes in the morning. She continued to massage his glistening penis, but it was diminishing already. Decker opened and closed his mouth, unable to say any­thing coherent, and his heart was banging so hard that it hurt.

"You're not—no, no—tell me you're not."

Cathy kept on smiling and kept on massaging him. She looked the same as she always had, but her skin was the color of a clouded sky, and her irises were pale yellow, like a snake. Her fingers felt as cold as ice, which made his penis shrink even more.

"Listen, I have to " Decker blurted, and made a clumsy attempt to struggle to his feet.

"Hey, everything all right in there?" Major Bruscow called out.

Decker took hold of Cathy's chilly wrists, trying to force her to stand up, so that he could stand up too, but as he did so the top of her head exploded and the stall was plastered in brains and blood and fragments of bone. Immediately, there was a second explosion, which made her bloody blond hair flap up, and blew away her left eye and half of her cheek. Decker screamed out, "No! No!" and twisted around on the toilet seat. His shirtfront was drenched in blood and a jellyish lump of Cathy's brain was sliding down the lens of his glasses.

"Cathy! For Christ's sake! We've got to—"

But Cathy fiercely gripped his hands and wouldn't let go. And even though most of the top of her head was missing,

77

she kept on smiling, and her yellow right eye kept on staring at him, unblinking, as if she still trusted him to save her.

There was a third explosion and the whole of her head burst apart. A blizzard of bone and flesh flew into Decker's face, knocking off his spectacles and blinding him. He wrenched his hands free from her and threw himself side­ways off the toilet seat onto the floor.

Major Bruscow shouted, "Okay! Okay! I'm going to kick the door down! Stand clear!"

Mayzie shouted back, "No! It's all right! I can open it! Everything's all right!"

Decker picked up his glasses and put them back on. When he looked up, he saw that it was Mayzie, not Cathy, and that there was no blood anywhere, nor lumps of flesh. He grabbed hold of the toilet-roll holder and heaved himself onto his feet, while Mayzie drew back the bolt and opened the door. Major Bruscow and Acting Deputy Chief Prescott were standing outside, both of them looking baffled and angry.

"What the hell is all this yelling ^about, Martin? And what are you doing in here, Officer Shifflett? This is the men's facility."

Mayzie tossed back her hair and shot Decker a look of to­tal exasperation. Decker said, "I, ah—I wasn't feeling too good. Something I ate. Officer Shiflett saw me out in the corridor and she—ah—offered to give me a hand."

Major Bruscow looked down at Decker's open zipper. "She gave you a hand, huh? I hope you realize this is a seri­ous disciplinary matter."

"I ate sashimi at Yamamoto. I guess the tuna must've been off."

"Very well. But I don't want anything like this happening again, and you, Shiftlett, stay out of the men's room in the future."

"Yes, sir," Mayzie said, and left.

7S

Decker went to the washbasin and splashed his face with cold water. Then he combed his hair and straightened his bright red necktie. He felt as shocked as if Mayzie really had turned into Cathy, and her head really had exploded.

Acting Deputy Chief Prescott left the men's room, but Major Bruscow stayed. "You okay, Martin? You're not hav­ing another of those stress-related things you went through last year?"

"I'm fine. Really."

"All right. I'll go along with that. But we can't afford to have a single detective in this division who can't give me 110 percent."

"I know that, Major. I'm okay. I shouldn't eat sashimi, that's all."

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hicks came back just after five o'clock. His forehead was beaded in sweat, his coat was slung over his shoulder, and he was carrying a can of Diet 7-Up.

"Anything?" Decker asked.

"Nobody saw nothing. Nobody heard nothing. Nobody knows nothing." Hicks popped open the soda and took four thirsty swallows, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Decker swung his feet off the desk. "Can't blame people for seeing nothing if there was nothing there to see."

"I don't know, Lieutenant. I just can't figure it. It's the lack of footprints and fingerprints and fiber evidence that bugs me the most."

"The perpetrator is a human being, Hicks. No human be­ing can walk through life without leaving some kind of a trail behind him. We'll get him, believe me."

Hicks looked at his watch. "I need to be going."

"How's that list of military memorabilia stores?"

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"Seven, so far, and seventeen online, although only one of the Internet stores is in the Richmond area."

"Right! No point in sitting on our asses. Let's start doing the rounds."

Hicks looked uncomfortable. "I was kind of hoping to call it a day. It's my little girl's birthday party this afternoon." "Oh yeah? How old is she?"

"Three."

"That's okay, then. She'll never remember that you didn't show."

They parked outside the Rebel Yell on West Cary Street and climbed out of the car. An old-fashioned red-painted frontage was hung with Confederate battle flags. The win­dows were crowded with sepia photographs of whiskery Confederate officers and tarnished military buttons and replica Colt revolvers and cavalry swords.

A bell jangled as they opened the door. Inside, there was a scrubbed oak floor and rows of glass display cabinets con­taining rifles and musketoons and cutlasses and all the para­phernalia of war, from dented cooking pots to inkstands to cartridge-rolling papers. The store smelled of wood, and musty old clothes, and wax.

Billy Joe Bennett was standing behind the counter—a huge, big-bellied man, with a gingery gray beard and circular glasses, dressed in a gray artillery coat with epaulets and origi­nal eagle buttons on it. He was talking to a round-shouldered middle-aged customer in one of those floppy Woody Allen hats that looks like a wilted cabbage. Billy Joe suddenly picked up a heavy saber and slashed it crisscross in the air, so that it whistled, and the customer said, "Wow," and backed away.

"Know what they used to call this?" Billy Joe said, in a voice as rich as fruitcake. "The wrist breaker. But it could whop a fellow's head off with one blow."

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"Real neat sword," the customer said. "How much do you want for it?"

"Couldn't take less than 3,500."

"Mind if I have a try?"

"Okay . . . but be careful. Wouldn't want you to do your­self a mischief."

The customer took the saber and jabbed it in the air a few times. Then he lifted it high over his head and whirled it about like a helicopter rotor. He let out a whoop and a "yee-haaa!" and promptly dropped it with a clatter onto the floor.

"Jee-zus! What are you trying to do, cut your damn feet off?" Billy Joe came bustling around the counter and picked up the saber as tenderly as if it were an infant.

The customer rubbed his wrist and said, goofily, "Guess I misjudged how heavy it is."

"Let me tell you something, this saber was carried at First Manassas by Captain Tom Hartley of the First Virginia Cavalry, one of the bravest Southern officers as was. He had his left arm blown off below the elbow by a minié ball but he never dropped it, not once."

"Really? That really gives it some provenance, doesn't it? It's going to look terrific hanging over my fireplace back in Madison. Do you take MasterCard?"

Billy Joe carefully laid the saber back down on the counter, polishing its blade with a soft yellow duster. He thought for a while, and then he said, "MasterCard? Uh-huh."

"How about American Express?"

"I can't exactly tell you that we take that either. Besides, this saber ain't for sale no more."

The customer blinked. "What do you mean it's not for sale anymore?"

"Exactly that."

"Well, how about that sword over there?"

"That's not for sale, neither."

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"It doesn't have a 'sold' ticket on it."

"I know. But nothing is for sale. In fact, I've suddenly re­membered that we're closed. Good-bye."

The customer hesitated for a moment, but when Billy Joe resolutely turned his back on him and noisily started count­ing out boxes full of military buttons, he looked around at Decker and Hicks and said, "Craziest store I ever heard of, won't sell you anything."

He hesitated a little longer and then he left. Billy Joe carried on counting buttons, but after a while, with his back still turned, he said, "What can I do for you today, Lieutenant?"

"I don't know. You're closed, aren't you?"

Billy Joe turned to face them, and picked up the saber again. "This isn't just a saber, Lieutenant. This is the glory of the South. And I'm damned if I'm going to sell it to some pigeon-chested nitwit who can't handle it with due respect."

"Pretty selective way to do business."

"Well, maybe it was just that particular guy. I hated his hat."

Decker peered into one of the display cabinets. "What I'm interested in is bayonets and bowie knives."

"Bayonets? I don't have too many of those. I have a good Kentucky bowie knife, though, with an ivory handle, dated 1863."

"I don't want to buy anything. I want to know if you've sold any bayonets and bowie knives recently, and to whom."

Billy Joe scratched his bearded chin. "Last bayonet I sold was a socket bayonet made by Cook and Brother, New Or­leans, 1861 or 1862. Very good condition, double-edged, twenty-one inches long. Last bowie knife . . . I couldn't tell you."

Hicks took out a photograph of Jerry Maitland. "Ever see this guy before? Ever sold him a bayonet?"

R3

Billy Joe lifted his glasses so that he could focus. "No . sorry."

Hicks handed him a copy of Sandra's drawing of the So-Scary Man. "How about this character? Ever see him?"

Billy Joe studied the drawing carefully, and then he said, "When was this drawing made?"

"What difference does that make?"

"You don't very often see pictures of these fellows, if at all."

"These fellows? What do you mean by that?"

Billy Joe pointed to the man's hat. "See them feathers, in his hatband? They're crow feathers."

"I didn't really take too much notice of them, to tell you the truth."

"Well, you shoulda, because they tell you a story. And the story is that this fellow is a member of what they called the Devil's Brigade."

"The Devil's Brigade? Who were they?"

"It's one of those Civil War legends, you know. Half truth and half legend. There was supposed to be thirteen men in all, twelve white and one colored, and they was specially re­cruited by Lieutenant General James Longstreet in April, 1864, just before the Battle of the Wilderness."

"Can't say I've ever heard of them."

Billy Joe handed the drawing back. "You never heard of them because they was like special forces, you know, the Civil War equivalent of Delta Force, and the whole opera­tion was a close secret. Nobody knows who the individual men was, or what exactly they was assigned to do, but the story goes that they was charged with creating all kinds of hell regardless of the usual rules and conduct of war."

He carefully sheathed the saber and hung it up in one of the display cabinets.

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Hicks said, "One of them was colored? That was pretty unusual, wasn't it, for the Confederate army? I didn't think they had any colored troops."

"Nor did they. The only coloreds who got involved in the war were personal servants that some of the officers took to the front line. I don't know why they made an exception in this particular case."

"Do you have any idea what this Devil's Brigade actually did?" Decker asked.

"Only stories and rumors. The situation was that the Confederates was being very hard-pressed by the Federals up by the Rapidan River. The Federals had more men and much more equipment. Grant was on the verge of breaking through the Confederate lines, and I guess Longstreet de­cided that he needed something to tip the balance back in his favor. I don't know if he recruited the Devil's Brigade with Lee's approval or not, but even if the stories and ru­mors are only half correct, those thirteen fellows wreaked some terrible havoc up there in the Wilderness. There were tales of men being turned inside out, and men catching fire spontaneous, and men being chopped into so many pieces that nobody could tell which piece belonged to who.

"On the night of May seven to eight, the horrors was sup­posed to have gotten so dreadful that there was wholesale panic in the Federal forces, and Grant had to order their im­mediate withdrawal, before it became a rout. Both armies left the Wilderness and eventually wound up at the battle of Spotsylvania."

"What happened to the Devil's Brigade? Didn't they go to Spotsylvania too?"

"The Battle of the Wilderness was the first and last time they was heard of. The stories and rumors say that Longstreet himself was so appalled by what they had done

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that he ordered them disbanded and gave special orders that they wasn't to be mentioned again. So the only accounts we have are those of eyewitnesses on both sides, and as you probably know the Wilderness was not a place where the common soldier could see much of what was going on, be­cause the woods was so dense, and the underbrush was al­most impossible to penetrate."

He looked again at Sandra's drawing. "I only ever saw one other drawing of the Devil's Brigade, and that was done by an artist lieutenant from Kershaw's division, who sketched all thirteen of them when they was gathered at Parker's Store, just before the battle. So I'd very much like to know who did this, and where they got their reference from, especially if they're in actual possession of the uniform. That would be worth thousands, and I'd be willing to make them an offer."

Hicks checked his notebook. "You say the Battle of the Wilderness was in May?"

"That's correct."

"Must have been pretty warm then, in May. So why did the Devil's Brigade wear greatcoats ?"

"Good question," Billy Joe said. "By that stage of the war, you wouldn't have recognized what most of the Southern soldiers was wearing as uniforms at all. They threw away everything that hindered their marching—their greatcoats, their hats, their spare blankets, even their boots, sometimes. They didn't have much use for their bayonets, either, so they stuck them in the ground for the quartermasters to pick up afterward.

"All I can say is that the Devil's Brigade must have been privileged not to march with the main multitude; but why they wore greatcoats I can't imagine. I've got two greatcoats right back here . . . you try putting one on and see how damn heavy it is."

* * *

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As they drove eastward, back to the city center, Decker said, "This is getting weirder by the minute. Even supposing Sandra didn't see the So-Scary Man, even if she only imag­ined him, how come she managed to draw such an accurate picture? If Billy Joe Bennett has only seen one other draw­ing of the Devil's Brigade, and he's an expert in Civil War memorabilia, where the hell did Sandra ever see one?"

"Maybe you should try asking her," Hicks suggested.

"1 don't know. I think we're looking at this all the wrong way. There's a key to this somewhere, but it's like in Alice in Wonderland. It's way up on top of the table and we're trying to find it on the floor."

He took a left on Belvidere Street and headed toward Monroe Park. Hicks looked up from his notebook and frowned. "Where are we going?"

"Back to your house, sport. You have a birthday party to go to, remember?"

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CHAPTER TWELVE

He dropped off Hicks at his small rented house off Valley Road. There were twenty or thirty small children playing in the front yard, and colored balloons tied to the porch. As Hicks walked up the path, a young, pretty woman in a pink dress came out onto the front steps. Hicks obviously told her who Decker was, and she gave him a smile and a wave. Decker waved back. Very tasty, he thought. Some guys have all the luck.

His cell phone played Beethoven. "Martin."

"It's Maggie. I just wanted to tell you that I'm-thinking of you."

"You're a bad woman, Maggie. Thank God."

"Listen, Cab has to go to Charlottesville on Tuesday af­ternoon. How about calling by for some of that sweet, sweet stuff you're going to be missing this weekend?"

"Sounds tempting."

"I'll hold you to it," she said, with a thick, dirty laugh.

* * *

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His shirt was sticking to his back and he felt like going home and taking a shower. He could use a couple of shots of tequila, too. But he couldn't stop thinking about what had happened in the men's room with Mayzie. He saw it over and over in his mind's eye, an endless video loop. Instead of Mayzie, Cathy lifting her face and smiling at him, her face as white as clouds and her eyes yellow. Then her head silently exploding, in a welter of blood and bone fragments and flesh. Then lifting her face again, and opening her eyes, and smiling again, and exploding again.

When he reached the intersection with Franklin Street he hesitated. A driver behind him blasted his horn and Decker mouthed asshole at him and gave him the finger. Then he turned right and drove back to headquarters. He collected a cup of strong black coffee from the vending ma­chine at the end of his corridor, and walked along to his of­fice, sipping it. He switched on his computer and hung his coat over the back of his chair while it booted up.

And she lifted her face, and smiled at him. And then her head slowly burst apart like a pumpkin, so that he teas lacerated by fly­ing teeth and splattered in blood.

He had looked up this file so many times before, but it still baffled him and it still hurt. Case number CZS/448/3251, Catherine Meredith Meade, aged twenty-nine years and two months. Right at the top of the report were several color photographs of the crime scene. That familiar bedroom at 318 West Broad Street, with its pale duck-egg walls. The dark blue woven throw, dragged to one side, and the cream-colored pillows that looked as if somebody had splashed a bucket of dark red dye all over them. Cathy's body, on the floor, one leg twisted behind her, her white nightshirt speckled all over.

It had happened at 1:30 on the morning of February 7. Decker had been called out to a suspicious drowning on

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Brown's Island. While he was away, somebody had entered his apartment either by picking the lock or using a passkey. There was no sign of any forced entry. The perpetrator had gone directly to the bedroom, approached the bed, and fired three soft-nosed slugs that blew Cathy's head to pieces.

Cathy had been all smiles and sunshine. Even her previ­ous boyfriend—although he had been desperately upset to lose her—still adored her. The only possible explanation for the killing had been that somebody had been gunning for Decker, and had mistakenly shot Cathy in the darkness—or else they had shot her to teach him a lesson that he would never forget.

The time that it happened, Decker had been involved in a complicated series of homicide investigations in the Jack­son Ward. He had suspected that the murders were con­nected with a vicious power struggle between two of the ward's most ruthless criminal organizations, the Strutters and the Egun. He had persuaded three witnesses to give ma­terial evidence against Queen Aché, the leader of the Egun. But when Cathy was killed, Decker had been so grief-stricken that he had been forced to take six months' sick leave, and his witnesses had all contracted irreversible amnesia.

So why were all these thoughts of Cathy coming back to him now? He couldn't understand what they meant—the nightmares, the waking hallucinations, that bizarre business of the fruit-and-chicken face on the chopping board? He scrolled down through the incident report. Maybe he had been reminded of Cathy's death because Cathy's killer had left absolutely no evidence—just like the killer of Alison Maitland and George Drewry. Cathy's killer had even avoided detection on the video monitors in the lobby, in the elevators, and in the corridor right outside their apart‑

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ment door. No suspects were ever arrested, and the case was still open, though inactive.

Decker was almost ready to leave when Cab came in. "How's it going?" Cab asked him.

Decker smeared his hands down his cheeks. "No place, fast. I think I'm going to call it a night."

Cab walked around his desk and looked at his computer screen. "You should let that lie. No point in picking your scabs."

"I don't know. I keep having these weird thoughts about Cathy and I'm wondering if my brain's trying to tell me something. Like, maybe there's some kind of connection between what happened to her and what happened to Ali­son Maitland and George Drewry."

Cab laid a hand on his shoulder. "You're a good cop, Mar­tin, but don't start getting all inspirational on me. Don't lose sight of what matters, and that's the evidence."

"Maybe you're right. It's just that, in this case, I think the most important evidence is that there is no evidence."

Cab turned his head away and let out a violent sneeze. As he was stentoriously blowing his nose, Decker's phone rang. He picked it up and said, "Mackenzie?"

"Hi, Lieutenant. It's Jimmy Freedman, down in the sound lab. Listen, I cleaned up that 911 call from the Maitland case. Thought you might be interested in hear­ing it."

"Sure. Give me a couple of minutes."

From behind his handkerchief, Cab gave him a wave, which indicated that he could go.

Jimmy was furiously chewing gum. "I went through it with Bill Duggan from the phone company. He's the Stephen Hawking of line faults. He even talks like Stephen Hawk‑

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ing. He said that Alison Maitland's 911 call was interrupted by an EMP."

"A what?"

"An EMP—electromagnetic pulse. This induces kilovolt potentials that can burn out integrated circuits, interfere with telephone systems, or randomize computer data."

"I get it," Decker said, trying to sound as if he did. "So what causes it, this EMP?"

"Usually a flux compression generator, which is an explo­sive used to compress a magnetic field."

"Explosive? Ah, you mean like a bomb?"

"Exactly. They even call them 'pulse bombs.' They're pretty simple to build if you have a basic knowledge of elec­tronics and demolition. The military have developed even more powerful ones, which use high-power microwaves. They dropped them in Iraq to take out Saddam's communi­cations systems."

Decker said, "That's very interesting. The only trouble is, there was no explosion that day in the immediate vicinity of the Maitland house. In fact—so far as I know—there was no explosion that day anywhere in the Metro Richmond area."

"Well, that's right."

"So what caused this particular EMP, if it wasn't a bomb?"

"Bill was puzzled by that, too. But he reckons that it must have been some kind of natural phenomenon. A sunspot, maybe."

"So, actually, we're none the wiser?"

Jimmy looked upward for a moment, as if there were an answer printed on the ceiling. Then he looked down again and said, "No, you're quite correct. We're not."

"You said you managed to clean the tape up. Is it any clearer?"

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"Hear it for yourself."

He hooked on his earphones and flicked a row of switches. Decker heard the first blurt of noise, and then the emergency operator saying, "Emergency? Which service?" This was immediately followed by a deafening crackle, and a man's voice screaming, "Help me! Oh, God, help me!"

Decker looked at Jimmy and Jimmy raised an eyebrow. "You hear that? That sounds distinctly like a fire burning. A bonfire, or brushwood, maybe. Maybe the guy's screaming because he's going to be burned."

Decker said nothing, but he felt a deep sense of forebod­ing, as if the floor were slowly creeping away from him, be­neath his feet.

"Yes, ambulance----" That was Alison Maitland. "Urgent—bleeding so bad!"

Then more crackling—closer, sharper, and a man's voice calling, "Muster at the road, boys! Muster at the road!"

More crackling, more screaming, and then a heavy crunch like a falling tree. Decker raised his hand and said, "Thanks, Jimmy. That's enough. That's very helpful."

Jimmy blinked at him in surprise. "You don't want to hear the rest?"

"That's okay. I don't have to."

"What? It makes some kind of sense?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

Jimmy stared at him. "Are you okay, Lieutenant? You look kind of—"

"Fine, Jimmy. I'm fine. I'm absolutely fine."

As soon as he opened his apartment door, he became aware of a smoky, perfumed aroma, like incense. He hefted his re­volver out of its holster, cocked it, and cautiously pushed the door a little wider. The smell could have been coming

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from the apartment below, where a young married couple regularly burned incense (they were either potheads or Bud­dhists, or both). But it seemed too intense for that.

Sliding his back against the wall, he made his way along the corridor to the kitchen. He jabbed his revolver into the open doorway, but the kitchen was empty. He crossed to the other side of the corridor and carried on sliding toward the living area.

There was nobody there, but three sticks of incense were smoldering in a small sand-filled urn that he usually used as an ashtray. And on the wall behind them, in jagged blood-red letters that were over two feet high, somebody had

scrawled SAINT BARBARA.

Decker slowly approached the lettering and touched it with his fingertips. It was still wet. It had the consistency of blood, but he couldn't be sure that it actually was, and he certainly wasn't going to taste it. He walked crabwise across the living area until he reached his bedroom door. It was about two inches ajar. He stopped, and listened, but all he could hear was the muffled sound of traffic outside, and the burbling of a television in the next apartment.

He took a deep breath and kicked the door wide open. His bedroom appeared to be empty, although he ducked down and checked under the bed, and then threw open his closet doors. Nobody there.

It was then that he heard a trickling sound coming from the bathroom. He edged his way toward the door and pressed his ear against it. It was a small, steady trickle, more like a faucet left running than anybody washing their hands. He carefully grasped the doorknob, and then, when he was ready, he flung the door open.

The bathroom was empty, too, except for his own reflec­tion in the mirror. But the hot faucet hadn't been turned off properly, and the washbasin was streaked with scarlet. It

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looked as if somebody had quickly rinsed their hands and then left.

But where had this somebody gone? The bathroom win­dow didn't open, apart from a small louvered skylight, and nobody could have passed him on the way in. He dragged back the shower curtain, just to make sure, but there was nobody there, either.

He turned off the faucet, holding it with only two fingers, in case there were fingerprints on it. He put the plug in, too, to prevent any more of the gory-looking contents of the basin from draining away.

He looked at himself in the mirror. You're not losing it, Martin. You're as sane as everybody else, and you can prove it. But apart from the incense and the scrawling on the wall, there was an almost palpable sense that somebody had been here, going from room to room, disturbing the air.

He went back to the living area and snuffed out the in­cense. Then he stood and stared at the lettering. SAINT BAR­BARA. What the hell was the significance of Saint Barbara? Cathy had whispered her name in his nightmare, and now here it was again, in letters that could have been blood.

He searched the room again, prodding his revolver into the drapes, even though he knew that he wouldn't find any­body. Then he locked his front door, fastened the security chain, and holstered his Anaconda. He picked up the phone and dialed directly through to Lieutenant Bryce in forensics.

"Helen?"

"Lieutenant Bryce went home about an hour ago. Can I help?"

"I hope so. This is Lieutenant Martin. Do you have any­body free to take some fluid samples at Nineteenth and Main?"

"What kind of fluid samples?"

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"Blood, it looks like."

"Is this a crime scene?"

"I don't know. To tell you the truth, I have no idea what happened here."

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He dreamed that he was running through the briars again, barefoot. The fires were much closer now, and he could feel the heat on his back, like an open furnace. Sparks were showering over his head and dropping onto the under­brush up ahead of him, so that he had to fight his way through bushes that were already blazing.

"Muster at the plank road, boys!" somebody was shout­ing, his voice hoarse with smoke. "Muster at the plank road!"

He kept his left elbow raised to protect his eyes from thorns and branches and to shield his cheek from the heat. A spark settled on his shoulder, eating through his shirt. He swatted it off, but it was still painful, and he could smell scorched cotton and burned skin.

He had a rough idea that the plank road was off to his left, about a quarter of a mile, but the woods in that direc­tion were burning fiercely and he could hear men screaming as they were overtaken by the flames. Instead, he headed off

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to the right, hoping to be able to circle around the fires and reach the road a little farther up. He tried to hurry, but the underbrush was even thicker here, and he had to leap and scramble like a hare.

What was even more frightening than the approaching fire was the feeling that somebody was catching up with him, hurrying through the thickets as black and fluid as a shadow. And he knew that this somebody was intent on killing him—not angrily, but cold-bloodedly, and grue­somely, inflicting more pain than anybody could imagine.

He quickly turned his head. He could see a silhouette only a few yards behind him. A tall silhouette, with flapping wings. Its coattails were snagged by the briars, but that didn't seem to slow it down at all, and he could hear its boots crack­ling through the bracken. Oh, Jesus. He simply didn't have the strength to jump any farther. His clothes were tangled in the bushes and his hands and feet were ablaze with thorns.

He stopped, gasping, and the silhouette rushed into him, knocking the breath out of him. He found himself in suffo­cating darkness, in a cage of bones, struggling desperately to get himself free.

"Can't breathe!" he screamed. "Can't breathe!"

He found Father Thomas in the diocesan garden at the back of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, his sleeves rolled up, weeding. Father Thomas stood up as he approached, a plump, pink-faced man with a bow wave of white hair.

"Lieutenant Martin! My goodness! It's been quite a while since we saw you!"

Decker looked around. "This is some garden, isn't it?" The flower bed that Father Thomas was tending was burst­ing with cream and yellow roses, and their fragrance was so heady that it was almost erotic.

"We do our best. . . . I always think that to keep a beauti‑

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ful garden is like saying a thank-you to God, for granting us such earthly delights."

Decker had come to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart at least twice a week in the days after Cathy had been killed. He had knelt for hours inside its cool, echoing interior, un­der its high gold-relief ceilings, and tightly closed his eyes and prayed that it was still January, and that her murder had never happened. Oh, God, can't you just wind back the clock?

The cathedral was unusual in that it had been financed and built entirely by one man, Thomas Fortune Ryan, the founder of the American Tobacco Company. Richmond had very few Catholics, but it was here that they could turn - for hope and encouragement, a grand Romanesque building that proudly proclaimed the Church Militant—the Lord God and His angels in their eternal struggle against Satan and his devils.

Decker said, "I guess I got disillusioned with God. My fault. I asked Him for something impossible."

"Don't worry." Father Thomas smiled. "I can assure you that God isn't disillusioned with you. And who's to say what's impossible and what isn't?"

He propped his hoe against his wheelbarrow and said, "Why don't you come inside and have a drink?"

"Sure. It's hot enough, isn't it? There's a couple of ques­tions I need to ask you."

"Of course. Always pleased to help the forces of law and order."

He led Decker through to a brown-and-white-tiled kitchen with a large oak table and windows that were glazed with muted yellow glass. He opened up the icebox and took out a frosted jug of lemonade. "Sorry we don't have any tequila."

"You remembered," Decker said, taking off his sunglasses. "Well .. . let's say there was more than one occasion

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when the condition in which you came here to pray owed more to the cactus spirit than the Holy Spirit."

He poured them each a tumbler of lemonade, making sure that there were plenty of lemon slices floating in them. Decker said, "What can you tell me about Saint Barbara?"

"Saint Barbara? Is there any specific reason for this?"

"I don't know yet. That's why I came to see you. I mean, you're the expert on patron saints, aren't you?"

"I like to think so. Saint Barbara, well . . . Saint Barbara was removed from the Roman calendar sometime in the late 1960s and her cultus was suppressed. But there are still many who are devoted to her, especially in the military, and those who work with explosives, such as armorers and gun­ners and bomb technicians.

"She's the patron saint of fire, you see, and lightning."

Decker said, "I've been having this nightmare . . . I'm running away from a brushfire. The first time I had it, I had another dream right afterward. I saw Cathy, and Cathy said that she wants to protect me from Saint Barbara."

Father Thomas raised his eyebrows. "I can't think why you need protection from her, particularly if you were trying to escape from a fire. Saint Barbara is honored by firefighters and by anybody working with fireworks or explosives. That's always assuming that your dream has any real significance, of course, and that it isn't just a fragment of something that you accidentally picked up during the course of your day's work."

"Cathy said, 'Saint Barbara wants her revenge.' She said it as clear as if she were standing right next to me."

"That's very strange. Saint Barbara was supposed to have been very beautiful and gentle and forgiving. It was said that she lived in Thrace, in the third century, and the story is that she was locked in a high tower by her father,

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Dioscorus, for disobedience. While she was imprisoned she was tutored by a whole variety of philosophers and orators and poets. From them, she learned that the worship of many gods was nonsense, and she converted to Christianity.

"Her not-so-loving father denounced her to the local au­thorities, and they ordered him to kill her. She escaped, but her father caught her, dragged her home by her hair, tor­tured her, and cut her head off. But he got his just desserts. He was instantly struck by fire from heaven, and killed.

"Because of this, people used to ask Saint Barbara to pro­tect them against fire and lightning and any other kind of death from the sky. You often used to see her image on fire stations and powder magazines and military arsenals, in a white robe, holding the palm of martyrdom in one hand and the chalice of happy death in the other.

"However, the official view today is that Saint Barbara is only a legend, and that somewhere along the line a pious fiction was mistakenly interpreted as history. So the likeli­hood is that your dream was nothing more than a dream."

Decker said, "The trouble is, it didn't stop at a dream. Saint Barbara's name was written on the wall of my apart­ment last night, in what looked like blood, and underneath it somebody had left incense burning. Don't ask me who. There was nobody there, and nobody in my apartment building saw any strangers entering or leaving."

"I have to admit that I'm baffled," Father Thomas said. "Although it's academically interesting that the name Bar­bara means 'stranger."

"I just wanted to know if you had any theories. Doesn't matter how wild they are. I'm investigating the Maitland homicide and the Drewry homicide, and as you've probably seen on the news, we don't have a single credible eyewitness and we don't have any evidence whatsoever. I mean, not

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even a single fiber, or a speck of saliva, or a microscopic sample of dirt. There's so much nothing that it's unreal.

"We had exactly the same dearth of evidence when Cathy was killed, and I've been trying to figure out if there's any kind of connection."

Father Thomas picked a lemon slice out of his tumbler and thoughtfully sucked it. "Sour," he said, when he caught the expression on Decker's face. "For some reason, I've al­ways liked sour. Mortification of the palate, I suppose."

"So . . . you don't have any ideas?"

"Not really, Lieutenant. But I've always been a strong be­liever in the divine messages that are brought to us in dreams. They may not make a whole lot of sense to us at first, but when we think back on them later, they can often give us striking insights into what is really happening to us. Sometimes I think that we're much more in touch with the meaning of our existence when we're asleep than we are when we're supposedly awake."

He leaned forward and said, very quietly, as if he were im­parting the greatest secret in the universe, "Let me put it this way . . . if you were God, and you wanted to talk to your dearest creations, when would you choose to do it? By day, when their minds were filled with noise and work and fam­ily and worry? Or by night, when everything is quiet, and your words could be heard in all their perception and their clarity? And their strangeness, too.

"I may well be wrong, but my feeling is that when you un­derstand what that means, 'Saint Barbara wants her re­venge,' then you will understand everything."

"Okay," Decker said. "But what am I supposed to think of this?"

He unbuttoned his shirt and tugged it sideways to expose his left shoulder. There was an angry blister about an inch

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above his collarbone, like a cigarette burn, and it was weeping.

"In my nightmare last night, in that brushfire, a hot spark fell on me. When I woke up, my T-shirt was burned, and so was my skin."

He held out his hands to show Father Thomas that they were crisscrossed in small red scratches. "I was fighting my way through a briar patch, and this is what happened. My feet are the same."

Father Thomas took hold of his hands and examined them closely. Then he looked up at Decker with his china-blue eyes and said, "If what you are telling me is true, this is very disturbing. When nightmares begin to cause physical harm, that is a sign that something truly terrible is about to happen."

"Father, I think it's already begun."

He was sitting with Hicks in the Third Street Diner when Beethoven summoned him on his cellphone. Da-da-da-DAH!

"Can't you change that?" Hicks complained. "Even Strauss hated Beethoven. Do you know what he said? He said, 'Beethoven is a shit.' He actually used those actual words."

"What would you prefer? 'The Camptown Races'?"

A woman's voice said, "Lieutenant Martin? This is Lily Messenger from forensics?" She had a way of lifting her words at the end of every sentence so they sounded like questions.

"Sure. How are you, Officer Messenger?"

"I'm good, thanks. I have the preliminary analysis from those fluid samples I took from your apartment yesterday evening?"

"That was quick."

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"You're right, the lettering on your wall was drawn in hu­man blood? Type-A, Rh-negative?"

"I see. Right . . . I appreciate that." He put the cell phone back on the table and said, "Saint Barbara was written in blood."

"You're kidding me. You think somebody's trying to warn you off?"

"Warn me off what? And why? It's not like we're breath­ing down anybody's neck."

Hicks cut a pancake with the edge of his fork. "Maybe we need to go through this whole thing right from the begin­ning again. Search the crime scenes again, reinterview the neighbors and the passersby. Like you say, nobody can go through life without leaving some evidence behind them. We've just missed seeing it, that's all."

Decker shook his head, unconvinced. "How's it going with the military memorabilia stores?"

"Only one more to check out, Wippler's Sutlery on Fifth Street, and one online."

Decker took one more bite of donut, grimaced, and dropped it back on his plate. "Let's try looking at this thing another way. We don't have any evidence, okay? But what else don't we have? We don't have motive. Alison Maitland was a very popular person and so was Major Drewry. All right, he was supposed to have been a bit of a grouch. But you don't normally disembowel people just because they complain about dogs messing on their front lawn.

"Whatever the captain thinks, I don't believe that two perpetrators could both be able to enter a house completely unseen and leave no forensic evidence whatsoever. I mean, that took some kind of skill that's practically supernatural. So we only have one perpetrator and we have to work out why this one perpetrator wanted to kill both Alison Mait­land and George Drewry. They don't appear to have had

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anything in common. Different age, different sex, different background, different religion. But there must be something that connects them."

Hicks wiped his mouth with his napkin and crumpled it up. "How about we check up on their personal histories, as far back as we can go?"

"Well . . . it'll make us look as if we're doing something, if nothing else."

As they paid the check, Hicks suddenly said, "Did we pick up anything off that 911 call? I meant to ask you."

Decker shook his head. "Nothing conclusive. Jimmy reckons there was some kind of electronic glitch, that's all, but he's still working on it." What else was he going to say? That the screaming that had interrupted Alison Maitland's cries for help were the very same screams that he was hear­ing in his nightmares?

They stepped out into the street. Hicks said, "You know that invitation to go out for a Mexican meal? Does that still stand?"

"Of course it does. How about Wednesday?"

"The thing is . . . I don't know . . . Rhoda doesn't seem to have settled down here at all."

"Give her some time, sport. She'll get used to it."

"She says that Richmond gives her a bad feeling, she doesn't know why."

"I told you, she's probably missing her friends. Don't worry, we'll find her some new ones."

"Well, I hope so. We had a pretty bad fight last night, and we never used to fight."

Decker put on his sunglasses. "She wants attention, Hicks, that's all. All women need attention." To prove his point, he grinned at a ponytailed blonde in a red baseball cap. The blonde turned to smile back at him and almost collided with a streetlight.

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* * *

Back at the office, his answering machine was flashing. Somebody had called him only two minutes ago. He pressed the play button, and there was some crackling and shuffling before he heard "Lieutenant Martin? This is Eunice Plum­mer. I thought you ought to know that Sandra's seen him again. The So-Scary Man."

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

He called back immediately. "Ms. Plummer? Yes, thanks for your message. When was this?"

"Only about fifteen minutes ago. We were walking along Marshall Street window-shopping when Sandra saw him walking toward us."

"Did you see him?"

"I'm afraid not. But Sandra was very frightened in case he recognized her, and she hid in a doorway."

"Where exactly was this?"

"Between Eleventh and Twelfth. Sandra says he went into the hospital."

"He did what?"

"She peeked out from the doorway to see how close he was, but he didn't cross over Twelfth Street—he went into the Medical College Hospital."

"Where's your close-protection officer? Can you put her on the phone?"

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"She didn't show. I thought maybe you'd decided we didn't need her anymore."

Shit, thought Decker. Cab and his goddamned cost-cutting. "Where are you now?" he asked Eunice, and then he cov­ered the mouthpiece with his hand and shouted out, "Hicks!"

"We're at McDonald's, on Eighth Street. Sandra was up­set so I bought her a milkshake."

"Stay there. We're coming to pick you up. Hicks!"

Hicks appeared, carrying a heap of folders. "What's the problem?"

"Sandra's seen him again. The So-Scary Man. Let's get going. This could be just what we've been waiting for."

Jerry Maitland was sitting up in bed watching a program about Antarctic exploration in the 1900s—jerky black-and white movies of men in furs and sealskins, standing in the snow.

"Of this American expedition in 1908, only one man, Clement Pearson, managed to return to base camp alive. He attributed his survival to a mysterious figure who led him through three days of relentless blizzards. The figure always walked twenty yards ahead of him always on his left, and never once spoke to him. On the morning that Pearson reached McMurdo Sound, the figure disappeared."

As he watched, Jerry became aware of a faint disturbance in the air, as if the door had been opened, even though it hadn't. He also had the unaccountable feeling that he wasn't alone anymore. He pressed the mute button on the TV remote and listened, frowning. On the screen, in utter silence, he saw Clement Pearson's charcoal sketch of the figure that was sup­posed to have saved him from freezing to death. Tall and hunched, a dark blur seen only through a teeming blizzard.

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While he listened, and watched, the figure on the screen appeared to swell and distort, as if Clement Pearson's sketch were actually moving. Then the window next to the televi­sion rippled and distorted, too. Jerry felt as if he were seeing his room through languidly wallowing water.

He blinked, trying to clear his vision. He was still on an­tibiotics and painkillers, and he expected that this was one of the side effects. Yet the flowers beside his bed suddenly melted and flowed, and he felt sure that there was somebody standing very close to him, only inches away. He could even hear breathing—tight, suppressed breathing—and another sound, which he couldn't identify. It was a thick, unpleasant rustling noise. It reminded him of the swarm of cockroaches that he had discovered when he was seven, rushing in their hundreds through the crawl space of his parents' old house. And had screaming nightmares about, for years afterward.

Hesitantly, he reached out with his thickly bandaged right hand for the panic button that lay on top of his blan­ket. He didn't want to look like a fool, calling the nurse be­cause he suspected there was somebody else in the room, when there obviously wasn't. But if this was a side effect of some of his medication, he thought that the nurse ought to know. He had never taken LSD or any other hallucino­genic, but he could imagine that this was what a trip was like. You could see, like, invisible people.

Just as he was about to press the button, the rustling noise abruptly changed into a sharp rush of air. Jerry felt some­thing hit his wrist, something as hard as an iron bar. He said, "Jesus!" and jerked up his arm and he was sprayed in the face with blood. He stared at his wrist in disbelief. His hand had been cut off, and it was lying on the green cotton blanket with its fingers curled tightly in convulsion.

He said, "Jesus" again, and then "Jesus." His wrist didn't

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even hurt, but blood was jetting all over the bed and spat­tering his pajamas. He thought: This hasn't happened. This can't be real. He could still feel his right hand, even though it was separated from his wrist, and he tried to make it reach for the panic button.

It was then that somebody grabbed his lapels and heaved him bodily out of bed. He lost his balance and rolled across the floor, knocking over his IV drip. Panting with fear, he tried to scramble toward the door on his knees and his re­maining hand, leaving a zigzag trail of blood on the vinyl, but he was pulled onto his feet with such force that he heard his spine crackle.

"Help me!" he screamed. "Help me!"

Somebody crooked an arm around his neck, so that he could scarcely breathe. Somebody very tall, and very power­ful. Somebody dressed in coarse woolen clothing. Some­body who breathed against the back of his neck in harsh, staccato bursts, hah! bah! hah! like the breath of a hungry wolf.

"Help me!" he choked. "For God's sake, help me!" But he could only manage the hoarsest of desperate whispers.

His pajama top was ripped open at the front, scattering buttons. Then—without hesitation—a knife blade was plunged into his stomach, an inch below his navel. The shock was intense, like being punched, and there was a high-pitched whistle of body gases. Jerry tried to struggle free, but his invisible attacker was so strong that he couldn't even buckle his knees and drop in submission onto the floor.

There was a moment's hesitation, and then his stomach was slit open, upward, with one measured stroke, as if his at­tacker were relishing every moment of terror that he was in­flicting. Jerry stared down at himself in utter dread. He could see no knife, and nobody holding it. Yet his skin

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parted in front of his eyes, revealing glistening red muscle and thick white fat, and then the first bulge of stomach, with a tracery of scarlet veins.

At first he felt completely numb. But as he was opened up wider, he was suddenly gripped by an agony that made him cry out, "Mama!" like a terrified child.

Decker opened the Mercury's rear door and grabbed San­dra's hand. "Come on!" he urged her. "We have to be quick!"

Eunice said, "What about me? Do you want me to come, too?"

"Please, yes. Hicks—can you take care of Ms. Plummer?" He ran up the hospital steps, tugging Sandra behind him. "What if he sees me?" Sandra asked.

"You don't have to worry about that. I'll take care of him. All you have to do is tell me where he is."

They pushed their way through the revolving doors. A security guard approached them with his hand raised and said, "Hey, slow down! You have to report to reception first!"

Decker showed him his badge. "We're kind of pushed for time, okay?"

"Who's the little lady?"

"Acting Officer Sandra Plummer. Now—if you don't mind."

They hurried to the elevator bank. Hicks and Eunice were close behind, but Decker said, "Take the next one!" and hit the button for the fifth floor.

On the way up, Sandra gave him a nervous smile. "This is exciting. I'd like to join the police."

"You already have," Decker assured her.

The bell chimed and the elevator doors opened. Decker took hold of Sandra's hand again and said, "We're going to

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go see Gerald Maitland first. He's the guy who lives in the house where you first saw the So-Scary Man, okay?" "Why are we going to see him?"

"Well . . . if my feeling about this is correct, I think the reason the So-Scary Man came here to the hospital was to look for him."

They ran along the corridor until they reached Gerald Maitland's room. There was no police guard outside, only an empty chair, an untidy newspaper, and two empty coffee cups. Decker tried to open Gerald Maitland's door, but it was jammed. It felt as if a chair had been wedged under­neath the handle, but he couldn't tell for sure because the blind was pulled down.

"Jerry!" Decker shouted. "Jerry, are you okay?"

He banged on the door with the flat of his hand. "Can you hear me, Jerry? Are you all right in there? Can you get out of bed and let me in?"

Sandra looked up at Decker worriedly, biting her lip. "Do you think something's happened to him? You don't think he's hurt him, do you, the So-Scary Man?"

"Let's hope not," Decker said. He grasped the door frame with both hands and gave the door a kick, and then another. "Jerry! Can you hear me, Jerry? Open up, Jerry, come on!"

Sandra pressed her index fingers against her forehead, as if she were concentrating very hard. "It's that wrong feeling again," she said. "It's that wrong feeling!"

Decker kicked the door again and again, but it still wouldn't budge. At that moment Hicks and Eunice came running along the corridor—and, from the opposite direc­tion, the cop who was supposed to be guarding Jerry Mait­land's door.

"Where the hell have you been?" Decker shouted at him. By way of explanation the cop lifted up a bag of donuts

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and said, "I'm sorry, sir, I was only a couple of minutes. What's wrong?"

"Help me get this goddamn door open. It's jammed, and Maitland's not answering."

Hicks and the cop both put their shoulders to the door, while Decker kicked it.

Eunice protectively put her arm around Sandra's shoul­ders, while Sandra herself stood with her eyes wide and her hands over her mouth, making a thin mewling sound under her breath.

Inside the room, Jerry was still being held upright, although his head had fallen back onto his invisible attacker's shoul­der so that he was staring blindly at the ceiling. He was suf­fering such waves of pain that he could hardly think, and there was a high-pitched singing in his ears. He was still try­ing to keep his intestines inside his sliced-open stomach, his left hand desperately gripping the slippery sides of his wound like a man in a storm trying to hold a thick rubber raincoat together.

"Now who's the martyr?" whispered a thick voice, close to his ear.

He didn't answer, couldn't. He just wanted it to be over with. Anything to stop the pain. Anything to end the hor­ror of what was happening to him.

"Now who's making the ultimate sacrifice?" the voice de­manded. "Now who's giving everything for honor and glory?"

He let out a gargle. He wanted to beg for mercy, but his attacker's arm was pressing too hard against his larynx. He thought he could hear knocking and somebody calling his name, but it seemed to be coming from very far away.

The room began to darken, as if a cloud had passed over

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the sun. As it did so, he felt a dreadful tugging sensation in his abdomen. His head dropped forward and he saw that an unseen hand was pulling his small intestine out of his stom­ach cavity. It rose up in front of him in spasmodic jerks, like a huge white worm.

It rose higher and higher, and then it started to slide around the bedrail, around and around, and coil itself into a knot. "No," choked Jerry. He couldn't bear any more agony.

There was a moment's pause, and then he was lifted clear of the floor, and heaved up onto a shoulder that he couldn't see. He screamed, and coughed up blood, and the knocking grew more and more frantic.

"Jerry! What's happening? Open the door, Jerry, for Christ's sake!"

But Jerry was helpless. He feebly tried to struggle but he was carried across the room, toward the window, and as he did so his intestines were dragged out of his body, yard by bloody yard, even though he scrabbled wildly to keep them in.

He reached the window. He was lifted even higher into the air, with his arms and legs flailing, and then he was flung through the glass. There was an explosive smash, and he felt himself tumbling through the air, colliding with the side of the building as he did so. But then there was a hideous, ago­nizing jolt, and he spun around and found himself hanging in midair, suspended by his own guts.

He didn't scream. He was too shocked and winded to scream. But he gripped his large intestine with his left hand and tried to pull himself upward. The peritoneal coating was far too greasy, and he had no more strength, but he kept thinking, I'm alive, I'm still alive, and as long as I'm still alive I can survive. He saw horrified faces staring at him and he thought he could hear people shouting. He thought: They've seen me, that's good, they'll send somebody to help. He twisted his intestine around his hand to give himself some

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more purchase, but he was much too weak to pull himself any higher.

"Alison?" he said. Then darkness flooded into his head and he died, dangling, slowly spinning around and around in front of the third-story windows, on the end of twenty-eight feet of bloody, stretched entrails.

As the window smashed, Decker gave the door another kick and it flew open as if it had never been jammed. He yanked out his revolver and stepped into the room. The first thing he saw was the grisly scarlet rope that was tied to the end of the bed, although he didn't understand what he was look­ing at.

"What the fuck?" the uniformed cop said.

"Looks like Maitland's escaped," Hicks said. "Tied some sheets together and broken the window."

Decker looked across at the blood-spattered bed, and then down to the zigzag pattern of blood on the vinyl floor. "Cut himself real bad, by the look of it."

He cautiously approached the window. As he did so, he became aware of an odd distortion in the air. The buildings opposite the hospital appeared to ripple and melt, as if he were looking at them through the rising heat from a corru­gated iron roof. Even the window frame wavered, which gave him an unexpected sense of vertigo.

He took one more step forward, and then he was vio­lently pushed in the chest. He was thrown sideways against the end of the bed, hitting his shoulder. Hicks, bewildered, said, "Lieutenant?" but then he was pushed, too, and promptly sat down in the armchair in the corner. The uni­formed cop was turning around to help Decker when he, in turn, was slammed against the doorjamb. "Holy shit," he said, as blood burst out of his nose.

Decker shouted, "The door! Shut the door!" but it was al‑

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ready too late. From the corridor outside, Sandra shrieked, "It's him! It's him!"

Decker pushed his way past the uniformed cop, his re­volver raised in both hands. Sandra was clinging on to her mother and pointing along the corridor. "There he goes! Look! Can't you see him? There he goes! He's there!"

All that Decker could see was a fluid, transparent wobble at the very end of the corridor. He was about to shoot at it when a side door opened and two nurses stepped into his line of fire, laughing. "Get back!" Decker yelled at them. "Get out of the way!" but before they could react one of them was thrown to the floor and the other was pushed on top of her.

Decker ran down the corridor and kicked open the door that led to the elevator bank. An elevator opened, and he lifted his revolver and shouted, "Freeze!" but it was only an orderly pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair. There were three other elevators, but two were at lobby level and the third was on seven. Not only that, the stairs were right at the other end of the hospital.

He said, "Shit," under his breath and holstered his re­volver. There was no point in putting out an APB on some­body who couldn't be seen. He walked back toward Jerry Maitland's room, stopping to help up one of the nurses.

"I felt like somebody really shoved me," she said, straight­ening her cap. "Somebody shoved me but there was nobody there."

"I know," Decker said. "The same thing happened to all of us."

"But what was it?"

"We don't know yet. It's some kind of trick. Don't worry, we're on top of it. I'll need to talk to you later, if you could give me your names."

"Lieutenant!" Hicks called out, and Decker could hear the

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distress in his voice. "Lieutenant, you'd better come take a look at this!"

At that moment, the door to the elevator bank was flung open and two of the hospital security guards came running toward them, followed by three male paramedics and a nurse.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Cab said, "This is getting very unfunny."

Decker took off his glasses and polished them with his garish red and yellow necktie. "At least we have a clear idea of what we're up against."

"Oh, you think so? We're up against some kind of invisi­ble guy who can only be seen by a young girl with Down's syndrome? What's clear about that? I can't even give any de­tails to the press."

"I don't see why not. Maybe there are some other people out there who have the ability to see him. You know, maybe Sandra isn't the only one."

"You really think I'm going to announce that we're look­ing for somebody we can't see? You must think I'm desperate for early retirement."

Decker put his glasses back on and shrugged. "I still think it might help. If what this guy can do is a trick, or some kind of mass hypnosis, then there could be somebody out there who can tell us how it's done. Then again—if he's a genuine

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supernatural phenomenon, there could be somebody out there who knows how to track him down and do whatever it is you have to do to supernatural phenomena to stop them from disemboweling people."

"Who? Father Karras?"

Hicks said, "No—I agree with Lieutenant Martin. I think people are pretty open-minded about weird stuff these days. Like, you know, poltergeists and demonic possession and shit."

Cab dragged out his handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. "I can't do it. The chief will go nuclear. The city man­ager's daughter went missing a couple of years ago and I called in a psychic detective. And then I made the mistake of mentioning it to Roger Barrett at WRVA."

"Kaboom!" Detective Rudisill remembered, with relish.

"Exactly. Kaboom. Can you imagine what the chief would do if I put out a public appeal for hypnotists and mentally challenged children and exorcists? She'd have my balls for her Sunday-best earrings."

"Okay, Captain," Decker conceded. "We still have a cou­ple of orthodox lines of inquiry to follow up—like we're looking into the Maitlands' family histories, and Major Drewry's, too."

Cab said, "All right . . . see how far you get with your reg­ular inquiries. After that—if you still think we need to in­volve the media—come back and talk to me first. Don't give me any nasty surprises."

"I wouldn't dream of it, Captain. But—one more thing.

We need to reinstate Sandra Plummer's close protection." "All right. I think I can find a way to justify that." "Oh—and one more thing. Are you still planning to go

to Charlottesville on Tuesday afternoon?"

"Why are you always so interested in my movements, Martin?"

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"No particular reason. I just like to know where you are, you know—in case things get exciting."

Outside in the parking lot, he met Mayzie. It was early eve­ning now, and the sky was golden.

"Hi, Mayzie," he said, putting his arm around her shoul­ders. "I've been meaning to call you. You're right. We really have to talk."

Mayzie twisted herself free of him. "I've decided I don't want a baby after all," she retorted.

"You've decided? Don't you think I have any say in this?" "You told me you didn't want to be a father."

"I know . . . but I don't know. I'm kind of warming to it. I could take him fishing. I could teach him how to play five-card stud."

"How do you know we would have a boy?"

"He must be a boy. Do I look like the kind of guy who'd have girls?"

"Decker, you're a head case. What happened in the men's room . . . you were like a mad person. I don't want to have children fathered by a mad person."

"I had a—thing, that's all. Kind of, like, a hallucination. Overwork. Not enough sleep. Too much coffee."

"Decker, you can't change my mind."

He had reached his car. He caught hold of her arm and stopped her. "Have you been to a clinic yet? Talked about it? I mean the medical implications?"

"Why should I go to a clinic?"

He frowned at her. "You're not going to try and do it yourself, are you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"The abortion. It could be really dangerous, doing it yourself."

"I'm not pregnant, Decker."

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"You mean you lost it?"

Mayzie shook her head. "I'm sorry. I was stupid. I thought it might bring us closer together, if you thought that I was going to have your baby. You don't know what I feel about you, do you? You don't care, either. I see you flirting and sleeping around with any girl you can get your hands on, and that hurts. That really, really hurts."

Decker lowered his head and ran his hand through his hair. "I'm sorry, Mayzie. The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt you. I've been hurting so much myself that I—well, I guess I got into the habit of it. I totally forgot that other people have feelings. That you have feelings."

He took hold of her and held her close, but they both knew that their affair was finished. After a while she wiped her eyes with her fingers and attempted a smile.

"He would have been a great little guy," Decker said. He punched his fists in the air as if he were having a playful fight with a five-year-old. "I would've called him Decker Martin Junior. Have to carry on the great family name."

Mayzie kissed his cheek and then walked away-across the parking lot. Quite unexpectedly, Decker found it difficult to swallow.

He collected Hicks by the front entrance and they drove to 4140 Davis Street, where the Maitland house was cordoned off by yellow police tape wound around the front railings. They let themselves in and walked into the gradually dark­ening hallway. The floors and walls were still stained with -Alison Maitland's blood, and the air was filled with a thick, sweet stench like rotten chicken. Blowflies were crawling up the windows and buzzing around the ceiling, and Hicks had to bat one away from his mouth.

"Jesus," he spat. "When are they going to clean this place up?"

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"When we've found what we're looking for," Decker said. He went through to the breakfast area and looked around. "I don't know what the hell we're trying to find, but let's try to think backward."

Hicks covered his nose and his mouth with his hand. "Wish I hadn't eaten those breakfast links this morning. Af­ter seeing that poor guy hanging by his guts . . ."

"I never knew that intestines were so strong, did you?" Decker remarked. He opened the glass doors in the hutch and looked inside. "Then again, when you think about it, you have to boil tripe for hours."

"For Christ's sake, Lieutenant."

Decker opened all the kitchen drawers and closed them again. He even peered into the ovens.

"We looked there," Hicks said, his voice muffled behind his hand. "We looked everywhere."

"I know, sport. And you couldn't find the evidence that you were looking for. But maybe you were looking for the wrong kind of evidence."

"What do you mean?"

"Well . . . Mayzie just gave me a hard time, you know? She made me understand how bad I was making her feel . . . when all the time I was only worried about me, and the way I felt. Maybe we ought to be thinking about our perpetrator, and what it was about the Maitlands that annoyed him enough to murder them."

"Come on, they were two ordinary, harmless people." "That's the way we see them. But maybe the perpetrator saw them different."

He went back into the hallway, still looking around. A large oil-painted landscape in a heavy gilt frame was hang­ing by the front door. He lifted it away from the wall so that he could check behind it.

"Already did that," Hicks said.

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Decker mounted the stairs. Over a dozen paintings were arranged on the wall—views of Richmond and Mechan­icsville and Newport News, as well as portraits of smiling children and dogs. There were some photographs, too: sepia pictures of houses and gardens, and group portraits of the Maitland family in the nineteenth century, all in their frock coats and stovepipe hats and crinolines.

Decker reached a group portrait on the turn of the stairs. He examined it very closely, and then he unhooked it and took it down from the wall. "Look at this," he told Hicks. "First Army Corps at Richard's Shop on Catharpin Road, May fifth, 1864, Major General M.L. Maitland commanding."

He took the picture up to the landing and switched on the light so that he could see it more clearly. It showed about twenty-five Confederate officers and men, stiffly posed on a plank road, with a wooden store in the back­ground and overhanging trees. Two of the officers were holding horses, one of which had moved while the photo­graph was being taken, so that it appeared blurred and ghostly. One of the officers had moved, too: a tall man who was standing a little apart from the others on the right-hand side, at the back of the group. Unlike the others, who were dressed in tunics, he wore a greatcoat. He also wore a slouch hat, which appeared to have a black and ragged cloth knot­ted around it. Decker could see that he was heavily bearded, but because he had turned his head away during the expo­sure, it looked as if his face had melted.

"Jerry Maitland told me that Sandra's drawing of the So-Scary Man reminded him of somebody, but he couldn't think who. But look at this guy . . . what do you think?"

Hicks frowned at the photograph with his hand still clamped over his nose and his mouth. "I see what you mean. But this picture was taken over 140 years ago."

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"Of course it was. I'm not suggesting that any of these people are still alive. But something lives on, doesn't it? The spirit of the Old South."

"I don't follow."

"Maybe the So-Scary Man has been dressing up as an of­ficer in the First Army Corps and killing people who were connected with the Civil War in some way."

"Why would he do that?"

"How the hell should I know? But it's possible that he's deluded himself into believing that he is an officer in the First Army Corps. Some of these Civil War nuts—well, they're nuts. Look at Billy Joe Bennett. I was talking to him once and he was getting all worked up about different sorts of frogs."

"Frogs?"

"No, I didn't know either. Frogs are those loops they use to hang their bayonets from their belts. I mean, we're talk­ing about obsession here. These people dress up in uniform and they stage mock battles, with carbines and everything. They trade cap badges and medals and cooking pots and all kinds of junk. We're only talking about one step away from full-blown lunacy."

"Well.. I guess you could have something there. After all, George Drewry was an army man. He might have had ancestors in the Civil War, too. But what about Alison Maitland?"

"Let's see if we can check her family tree, too. Mean­while, let's get this photograph back to the lab. I want it blown up and enhanced. And let's put a couple of guys on the Internet . . . let's see if they can log on to any Civil War Web sites and chat rooms. Maybe they can come up with some kind of pattern of behavior, or even some names."