What the Night Knows

32

DETECTIVE LIONEL TIMMINS KNEW THAT SOME IN THE DEPARTMENT, among themselves, called him the Walking Chest, and still others called him the Dog, because he had a bulldog face and he was difficult to shake loose when he got his teeth in a case. He had his teeth in this one, and he didn’t like the taste of it.

Because this was Homicide South, within the Lake District and only two blocks from his home, he caught the call and arrived behind the ambulance as its siren wound down to silence and the paramedics threw open their doors, the earliest he had ever arrived at a crime scene.

The medics stabilized the wounded—the husband critical, the wife less serious but not good—and took them away as four uniforms arrived to secure the scene. Lionel managed to ask a few questions and get answers from the woman before they carried her out.

The girl, Davinia, had called an aunt to take her and Lenny to the hospital. Lionel waited with them in the living room.

Wrenched with grief but determined to be brave, the boy held fast to his sister’s hand, so innocent of evil until now that his sudden education was a painful thing to see.

The girl was remarkable, a delicate rock. Although slender and only about five feet four, she seemed tall, strong, sure. Although her eyes, like her brother’s, glistened with tears, hers didn’t spill as his did. Lionel well knew that beauty was power, but her power had a deeper source.

Davinia provided the identity of the dead man in the kitchen and spoke frankly but not angrily about his visit five days earlier. She produced the unwanted diamond wristwatch, which looked like a year’s wages.

“I want to be rid of it,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“This isn’t evidence, I can’t take it,” Lionel said. “Your mother shot him in self-defense. There won’t be any trial of anyone.”

“Can’t you put it with his body?”

“No. Some charity might be the place for it.”

Neither Davinia nor Lenny had seen events unfold in the kitchen, but from the time line they could provide, Lionel deduced the order in which the shootings occurred.

The aunt appeared, the children went with her to the hospital, and the criminalists arrived to sift the scene.

A flash report on Reese Salsetto revealed one conviction and much suspicion. He had served a year in prison when, if all were known, he might have deserved a century.

The criminalists came quickly to the determination that Reese shot Jack Woburn with the 9-mm pistol fitted with a sound suppressor and that Brenda Woburn killed Reese with her .38 revolver.

According to Brenda, she stumbled, fell against some cabinets, and shot herself after killing her brother. Lionel and the lab boys found it difficult to believe that a woman proficient enough with a handgun to put three centralized rounds in a man at a distance of even just fifteen feet would accidentally shoot herself in the chest.

Furthermore, though Reese might be a hothead, he had managed to conduct more than a decade of criminal enterprise with only one arrest and one conviction. Even if, as Brenda had said, he molested their younger sister, Jean, when he was a teenager, reason argued that he would have tried to get to his niece in a way that was as circumspect as his behavior with Jean—and more in accord with the weasely business with the wristwatch. Reese cared too much about Reese to try to kidnap the niece by launching a reckless assault on the entire Woburn family.

Leaving the kitchen to the techs, the uniforms outside chasing away curious neighbors and swapping bullshit stories, Lionel walked the rest of the downstairs, touching nothing, studying everything. He was troubled that the facts of the shooting scenario were beads on a string of irrationality and therefore, though facts, were worth no more than the weak filament on which they were strung.

Something else bothered him, too, but he couldn’t identify the source of his uneasiness until, standing in the dining room, he saw movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to watch the pendant crystals swaying on the simple chandelier above the table. In the absence of a draft, with no vibration to be felt or heard, the easy pendulum motion of the crystals seemed inexplicable. Perhaps more curious was the lack of uniformity in their arcs: some swung north-south, some east-west, others to different points of the compass. The crystals slowed and stopped as he watched—and then he turned toward a noise behind him. It was a mere rustle, it could have been anything or nothing, but some quality of it caused his neck hairs to prickle. He realized that in addition to the weaknesses in the crime scenario, the other thing that bothered him was the house.

He did not know what he meant by that.

Some houses had a history that colored your feeling about them: murder houses, for instance, in which innocents had been tortured and slaughtered. The shootings in the kitchen didn’t qualify because they were too clean, insufficiently perverse. Lionel knew nothing about the history of this house, and based on the impression that Lenny and Davinia made on him, he doubted this was a family with dark secrets.

A house could subtly abrade your nerves if the proportions of its rooms were wrong, if the colors were harsh, if items of furniture clashed with one another. But this architecture was harmonious, the colors pleasant, the furniture homey and of a kind.

Waiting for the rustle to repeat, Lionel knew what bothered him about the house: a feeling of being watched. In spite of having been railroaded for murder and having spent six years in prison, he wasn’t prone to paranoia. In his work, he relied on a sober instinct for danger, and the only thing that plucked his fear wire was the thought of losing his mom or one of the aunts who lived with him.

Overhead, floorboards creaked as someone crossed an upstairs room. The family was at the hospital. The criminalists were in the kitchen and had no reason to venture to the second floor.

He returned to the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, listening. A soft thump might have been a door closing above or only a settling noise. Another thump.

Lionel ascended to the second floor and conducted a casual but thorough search. The room doors were all open or ajar, and he toed or elbowed them wider, to pass through. Light switches chased darkness but nothing else, no intruder.

The final room at the end of the hall seemed to be Davinia’s. The decor was feminine but not frilly, almost austere. Her books proved to be of a more serious nature than he might have expected.

She had been doing homework at a table that served as her desk. Her computer remained on.

The screen saver consisted of ceaselessly shifting shapes in gold, red, and a variety of blues. He had never seen anything quite like it, and in fact it was beautiful, worth watching for a minute, almost mesmerizing.

Although he expected the shapes to remain mysterious, fluid and continuously changing, the blues and golds suddenly coalesced into a handprint on a purling red background, as though someone flattened a palm against the inner face of the screen.

Lionel found himself in the desk chair without realizing that he had sat down. He watched, almost as an observer of someone else’s action, as his right hand moved forward to match itself to the handprint on the screen.

On contact, Lionel felt a cold quivering against his palm and spread fingers, merely an odd vibration at first, but quickly growing into a vigorous squirming sensation, as if his hand were pressed against a mass of newborn snakes. Just as his curiosity gave way to alarm, something nipped lightly at the pad of his thumb, a fang prick but not a full bite, as if one of the imagined serpents were testing his susceptibility to their venom. He snatched his hand away from the screen and shot up from the chair.

No puncture marked his thumb.

He was as disturbed by his expectation of a wound as by the phantom nip. His revulsion at the cold squirming sensation lingered although he had touched nothing worse than a smooth glass surface. Intellectually, he understood that the foul sensation of squirming serpents must have been the consequence of some rare kind of static charge, but he still felt as though he had touched something alien and vile.

The shapes on the computer were amorphous once more. Lionel watched for five minutes, waiting for the handprint to appear again, assuming that it must be a programmed feature of the screen saver, but his vigil went unrewarded. Finally, he switched off the system in case there might be an electrical problem with it.

In the upstairs hall, he stood listening.

He still felt watched.

Lionel Timmins wondered if he had been working too hard lately.