What the Night Knows

8

THE CASE DETECTIVES—TANNER AND SHARP—HAD SEARCHED Billy’s room, leaving a bit less disorder than a burglar would have caused.

A few drawers in the highboy were half open. Tanner or Sharp had rummaged through the clothes therein, leaving them in disarray.

When they searched between the mattress and the box springs, they had not entirely disarranged the chenille spread.

On the nightstand stood a digital alarm clock. The numbers were not flashing as they had flashed on the kitchen clock.

John searched the desk, the closet, the nightstand, with no expectation of finding anything the other detectives had overlooked.

Previous to his killing spree, Billy Lucas’s interests had been, judging by the evidence, entirely wholesome. Sports magazines. Video games, but not particularly violent ones.

Bookshelves held a couple hundred paperbacks. John read each spine. Science fiction, fantasy, mainstream fiction: The boy’s interests were varied, but he possessed not a single true-crime book.

The computer on the desk was operative. Current department procedure in a case of this kind would have been to make a full backup of every document in the directory and take that, instead of the entire hard drive, for review later. With Billy’s confession and his commitment to the state hospital, no detective would have discovered—might ever discover—what the computer contained.

Before reviewing the contents in alphabetical order, John scanned the directory for intriguing key words. In less than half a minute, he found a document titled CALVINO1. Then CALVINO2.

The first contained photos downloaded from an Internet site devoted to serial killers and mass murderers. Here were Tom and Rachel Calvino, John’s mother and father. Also Marnie and Giselle, his sisters, at the ages of ten and twelve.

The photos accompanied the account of Alton Turner Blackwood’s fourth and final massacre of a family. The document did not contain a picture of the killer; apparently none was ever taken of the drifter during his life, and the postmortem shots in the medical examiner’s file were sequestered under a court order that protected young John’s privacy and that was never revoked.

For the same reason, John’s photo was not included. Besides, the site depicted only victims, and he was the sole survivor.

On the screen, his sisters were so lovely.

Many years had passed since he’d been able to look at photos of them. He had avenged them, for what that was worth. But if he had done something differently on that long-ago night, if he had not done a thoughtless thing that he had done, one of his sisters or perhaps both of them might still be alive.

Although he loved their faces, he could not bear the sight of them. He exited the document.

The atmosphere in this murder house grew more oppressive by the minute: the rain streaming down the windows, the humid air, a deathly stillness yet a persistent impression that someone listened, waited, and prepared for him in the nearby hallway or in another room.

He closed his eyes and summoned in memory a favorite painting, Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. This scene of a sixteenth-century Belgian town in a winter twilight, illuminated by a recent snowfall, was full of movement yet serene, somber yet enchanting. Contemplation of it always calmed John—until now.

Johnny.

At the state hospital, the boy had called him Johnny. Having read about Alton Blackwood, the kid knew John had slain the killer.

Here seemed to be proof that Billy patterned his killing spree after Blackwood’s murder of the Valdane family twenty years earlier.

When John retrieved the second document, CALVINO2, he discovered five photographs, the first of himself. It was part of a newspaper article about a citation for valor that he and his sometime partner, Lionel Timmins, had received more than two years earlier.

In the picture, he appeared uncomfortable; in fact, he had been embarrassed. Having survived, as a boy, when everyone else in his family had died, he could do nothing as long as he lived that would make him, in the balance, deserving of an award for valor.

He had tried to decline the presentation, but Parker Moss, Area 1 commander—who oversaw Homicide, Missing Persons, and Robbery, in addition to other bureaus, details, and units—insisted he attend and accept. Awards for valor were good PR for the department.

The second photo in CALVINO2 was of Nicolette. Nicky. It was from the website of Lannermil Galleries, a fine-art dealer, the primary representative for her work. She looked radiant.

John’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his pants.

The file also contained photos of their son, thirteen-year-old Zachary, and their daughters, eight-year-old Minette—whom they all called Minnie—and Naomi, eleven. These three were snapshots, taken a month earlier, on the evening of Minnie’s eighth birthday. The only people present had been him, Nicolette, and the three kids.

John could think of no way that these pictures could have been transferred to Billy Lucas’s computer. No way.

Nevertheless, he recognized the document for what it must be: a file of homicidal desire, photographs of targets, the beginning of a murder scrapbook. Evidently Billy had intended at some point to kill them all, just as Alton Blackwood had wasted all but one member of the previous Calvino family.

After exiting the document, John looked at the nearest window down which rain washed in the fading daylight, and he thought of the dark urine flooding across the glass partition between him and Billy.

His disquiet quickened into fear. The house was warm, but he was chilled. He shivered.

He did not feel less of a man or less of a cop for being afraid. Fear was useful if it didn’t foster paralytic indecision. Fear could clarify and sharpen his thinking.

Calling up the directory again and scrolling through it, John searched for other document titles that might be surnames. Perhaps Billy had selected and researched other target families.

Whatever the young killer’s plans had been, surely they were now of no concern. The security at the state hospital was layered and reliable. He could not escape. The psychiatric board would not deem him cured at least for decades, if ever; they would not turn him loose.

Yet intuition warned John that his family was a target. The taut wire of his survival instinct vibrated, it hummed.

When he found no obvious surnames used as document titles, he closed out the program and shut down the computer.

From within the desk came a few bars of a song that John didn’t recognize. When he pulled open a drawer, the bars repeated, and he picked up a cell phone that must have belonged to Billy Lucas.

No caller ID appeared on the display.

John waited through fourteen repetitions of the song bite. When the call was not sent to voice mail, the caller’s persistence gave him the reason he needed to answer.

“Hello.”

He received no reply.

“Who’s there?”

Not a dead line. The hollow silence was alive, the caller unresponsive.

The best way to engage in any game of intimidation was to play boldly by the rules of the would-be intimidator. John listened to the listener, giving him no satisfaction.

After half a minute, a single word whispered down the line. He could not be sure, but he thought it sounded like Servus.

John waited another half minute before he terminated the call and returned the phone to the drawer.

At the door, when he extinguished the bedside lamps with the wall switch, rhythmic strobes of green light drew his attention to the fact that the clock radio, which had been keeping time when he first entered the room, was now flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.…

When he stepped into the upstairs hallway, where he had left the overhead lights on, a more conventional ringing came from a telephone toward the back of the house. After a hesitation, John followed the sound, pushed open a door, clicked on a light, and found the former master bedroom, where much of the living-room furniture was now stored. The phone rang and rang.

He didn’t know what might be happening. He suspected that the worst thing he could do was encourage it, and he switched off the lights, closed the door.

In the hall, at the head of the stairs, he extinguished the ceiling fixtures—and darkness folded around him like great black wings, the landing window offering no relief.

His heart beat faster as he fumbled for the flashlight in one of his sport-coat pockets. The LED beam painted coils of light on the walls, made the pattern in the stair runner seem to wriggle with life, and darkled down the polished-mahogany railing.

Descending past Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, he was peripherally aware of something new and monstrous about the painting, the Chinese lanterns too bright, their orange color smeared across too much of the canvas, as if one or both of the little girls in white dresses had been set afire, but he refused to look directly.

The telephones shrilled in the living room, study, and kitchen. The pause between each ring seemed to be shorter than usual, the electronic tones harsher and more urgent.

He snared his raincoat from the newel post, didn’t pause to put it on. When he threw open the front door, the phones stopped ringing.

Stepping onto the porch, which lay now in the grip of night, he thought he saw a figure on the padded glider to his left, where Billy Lucas had once sat naked and blood-soaked to wait for the police. But when John swept the glider with the flashlight, it proved to be unoccupied.

He locked the house, slipped into his raincoat, found his car keys, and hurried into the rain, forgetting to put up his hood. On his head and hands, the downpour felt as cold as ice water.

In the car, as the engine turned over, he heard himself say, “It’s begun,” which must have been an expression of a subconscious certainty, for he had not meant to speak.

No. Not certainty. Superstition. Nothing had begun. What he feared would not come to pass. It could not. It was impossible.

He reversed out of the Lucas driveway, into the street, fence pickets flaring bright and shadows leaping.

The wipers swept cascades off the windshield, and the rain seemed foul, contaminated.

In the fullness of the night, John Calvino drove home to his family.