What the Night Knows

16

WEARING A DARK-BLUE ROBE OVER HIS PAJAMA BOTTOMS, John stood before the gallery in his ground-floor study. There were photos of the kids when, as infants, each had come home from the hospital, and others taken on every birthday thereafter, a total of thirty-five pictures. Soon the gallery would be continued on the next wall.

The girls liked to come in now and then to recall favorite birthdays and to make fun of the way each other had looked when younger. Zach was less inclined to enjoy photographs taken when he was a toddler and a grade-schooler because they didn’t comport with his image of himself as a young man in preparation to be a tough marine.

More than he could have expressed even to Nicky, John looked forward to seeing his daughters become women, because he believed that each had a great good heart and would change her small corner of the world for the better. He knew they might surprise him but would always delight him by the way they lived their lives. He knew, as well, that Zach would become anything he wanted to be—and in the end would be a better man than his father.

One of two windows in the study provided a view of the flagstone terrace and the deep backyard, which now lay in absolute darkness. Their house stood on a cul-de-sac, on a street that was a peninsula between two converging ravines, quiet and sequestered for an urban home. Beyond their back fence, the land dropped off steeply, into brush-choked woods. On the farther side of the ravine, the lights of other neighborhoods were smeared and faded by the rain. Between the study window and that distant glow, nothing could be seen: not the terrace or the lawn; not the arbor twined with climbing roses; not the great deodar cedar, its boughs drooping gracefully.

Although not remote, the house was sufficiently secluded to allow a rapist-murderer, hot with need and icy with determination, to come and play and go with little risk of being seen by neighbors.

Also out there in the dark lay Willard’s grave. City ordinances forbade the interment of animals on a residential lot unless they were cremated. An urn containing their beloved golden retriever’s ashes was buried under a black-granite plaque beyond the rose arbor.

The girls had suffered such grief at the loss that they remained reluctant to risk losing another. But perhaps the time had come to bring a new dog into their lives. Not a golden retriever who counted everyone his friend, but instead a breed with a greater reputation for aggressively protecting its family. Maybe a German shepherd.

At his desk, John switched on his computer and sat in thought for a minute before keying in the number for the state hospital. The voice-mail system offered options, although the reception desk and various offices were closed until eight in the morning. He pressed the number for psychiatric-ward security.

A man answered on the second ring.

John pictured the stark security vestibule on the third floor, where Coleman Hanes had taken him just the previous afternoon. He identified himself, learned that he was speaking with Dennis Mummers, and inquired if Billy Lucas had escaped.

“Where did you get that idea?” Mummers asked. “Nobody’s ever walked away from here, and I’d bet a year’s wages nobody ever will.”

“I assumed he didn’t have a phone. But I got a call from him.”

“Phone in his room? Of course he doesn’t.”

“If legal counsel wants to talk to him without coming out there, how is it done?”

“He’s fitted with restraints and taken to an obcon room that has a no-hands phone.”

“What’s obcon?”

“Observed-conference room. We watch him through a window, but it’s a privileged conversation, so we can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s in restraints and he’s watched to be sure he doesn’t pry anything out of the phone, anything sharp that might be a weapon.”

“He called me a little more than ten minutes ago,” John said. “On my home-office line. He must have gotten possession of a phone.”

Mummers was silent for a moment. Then: “What’s your number?”

John gave it to him.

“We’ll have to toss his room,” Mummers said. “Can I get back to you in half an hour?”

“I’ll be here.”

While he waited to hear from Dennis Mummers, John went online to a series of dot-gov sites, accessing information available to the public, but also restricted information that he could view only with his police pass code.

The need had arisen to confirm that Coleman Hanes was the man he appeared to be. John had given the state-hospital orderly the unlisted number that Billy Lucas had called, and he could think of no other way that the killer could have obtained it.

In minutes, he ascertained that the Marine Corps emblem tattooed on the palm of Hanes’s right hand was not in support of a fraudulent persona. The orderly served admirably in the Marine Corps, was decorated and honorably discharged.

Hanes had no criminal history in this state or in any state with which it shared information. Even his driving record was without a blemish.

The truth of military service and the lack of a police record did not clear him of having colluded with Billy Lucas, but it made the possibility less likely than it otherwise might have been.

When Dennis Mummers called back, he said, “Billy doesn’t have a phone. Are you certain it was him?”

“His voice was unmistakable.”

“It is distinct,” Mummers acknowledged. “But how often have you spoken with him before your visit here?”

Deflecting the question, John said, “He mentioned something to me that only he could know, related to my interview with him.”

“Did he threaten you?”

If John confirmed the threat, they would expect him to file a report, and if he did so, they would learn that he had no authority to involve himself in the Lucas case.

“No,” he lied. “No threat. What did Billy say when you searched his room for a phone?”

“He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.”

“Is there a chance maybe someone on the staff might have allowed him to use their cell phone?”

“Depending on the circumstances,” Dennis Mummers said, “that could be a reason for dismissal. No one would risk it.”

“In this work, Officer Mummers, I’ve learned some people will risk everything, everything, for the most trivial of reasons. But thank you for your assistance.”

After he hung up, John went to the kitchen, where he turned on just the light in the exhaust hood over the cooktop.

Most of their friends drank wine, but for the few with a taste for something stronger, they kept a small bar in a kitchen cabinet. Certain that he could get back to sleep only with assistance, he poured a double Scotch over ice.

He was disturbed less by the threat Billy Lucas had made than by the last words the murderous boy had spoken on the phone.

To the best of his recollection, John had never shared with the police any of what the murderer of his parents and sisters, Alton Turner Blackwood, had said before he died. John had been mute with grief and terror, but Blackwood had tried to distract him with talk.

The next-to-last thing Blackwood said on that long-ago night was word for word the last thing Billy said on the phone less than an hour earlier: Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.