What the Night Knows

40

HAVING GOTTEN NOT ONE MINUTE OF SLEEP DURING THE night, John claimed at breakfast that he felt weary, out of sorts, as if the flu might be coming on, which was true as far as it went. He allowed Nicky to think he had called in sick, but of course he was already on an unpaid leave.

He retreated to his study on the first floor with an insulated pot of caffeine-free coffee. For a while he stood at a window, gazing at the backyard.

On the grass blazed the leaves of the scarlet oak, like scales shed by a dragon. Dragon scales sounded totally Naomi, and when John thought of her, he smiled. Maybe she hadn’t inherited all of her fanciful imagination from her mother.

The scattering of fallen leaves lay undisturbed. In daylight, no spirit, blithe or otherwise, capered through them.

He didn’t know what to think of the incident with the leaves. In the dark, after a generous serving of Chivas Regal, the presence—first warning, then playful—had seemed as real as the plume of his crystalized breath in that cold air. But now …

He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.

With a mug of coffee, he sat in his armchair, put his feet on the footstool, and pretended for a while that he would methodically think through the ticking threat of Alton Turner Blackwood until he understood how to disarm it. But weariness was a sea in which he sank, and thinking became as arduous as walking on the ocean floor with a world of water pressing down relentlessly.

He dreamed of a surreal journey in a world of falling scarlet leaves, falling girls, falling blades of guillotines, the leaves no longer leaves at all but laminas of blood cast into the air from the severed neck stumps, and then not either laminas of blood or leaves but sheets of paper, pages from a book, and something important on them that he must read, must read, except that they floated away as he tried to pluck them from the air, slipped through his fingers as if they were smoke, just as the girls slipped through his hands as he stood at a cliff’s edge and tried to save them, Davinia and Marnie and Giselle, girls at the brink, turning to smoke in his hands but then suddenly flesh-and-blood girls again as they plunged, plunged, Minette and Naomi, all the girls plunging away from him, down and down through a rain of scarlet leaves and book pages and glittering blades of merciless intent, then no leaves or pages or blades but only snow, girls falling through night snow and slamming into a snow-mantled street—Whump!—with lethal force, girl after girl—Whump! Whump! Whump!—and already on the street, on his back in the snow, staring with the steady eyes of a dead man, staring up at the falling girls, lay Lionel Timmins, the girls plunging to their deaths around him—Whump! Whump!—and heavy snow falling into Lionel’s unblinking, sightless, frozen eyes.

“John?”

Someone shook him by the shoulder, and when he opened his eyes, he thought he must still be dreaming, because Lionel Timmins leaned over him.

“John, we have to talk.”

The dusting of snow on Lionel’s face was, on second look, white beard stubble. He hadn’t shaved recently.

Sitting up straighter in his chair, swinging his legs off the footstool, John said, “What’re you doing here? What’s going on, what’s happening?”

Perching on the stool, Lionel said, “That’s what I need to know, partner. What the hell is going on?”

John wiped his face with both hands, as if sleep were a cocoon from which he emerged and he were pulling off the gossamer remnants that still clung to him. “When did your beard go white?”

“Years ago. That’s why I try to shave twice a day. Makes me look like Uncle damn Remus or something. Listen, what is this—you gave Mrs. Fontere your card with all your phone numbers?”

“Mrs. who?”

“Fontere. Lois Fontere. Jack Woburn’s sister.”

“Oh, yeah, all right. Aunt Lois.”

Filaments of sleep, like threads with a static charge, clung to John, tangling his thoughts. He needed to be wide awake with Lionel.

“I’m on this all night,” Lionel said, “now I just find out from her you were at the hospital.”

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s a mess, but she’s alive. John, you were at the hospital just minutes before Andy Tane blew all his fuses.”

“Was he the one? Tane? The one who jumped with the girl?”

“He did all of them. Including Mickey Scriver, his partner.”

“I saw them fall. Walking to my car in the portico, heard the shots, the glass breaking.”

Lionel’s flat expressionless stare was one that he sometimes used with witnesses and often with suspects, to make them wonder how much he knew. “You saw them fall.”

“She was a fine girl. A good girl.”

“You saw them fall and you—what?—just drove away?”

As John rose from the chair, Lionel got up from the footstool.

“You want some coffee?” John asked.

“No.”

“Something else?”

“No.”

John went to the gallery wall on which were hung the birthday photos of the kids. Lionel followed him, but John focused on the photographs.

“You’re on leave, John. Are you still on leave?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you dogging this case? Why did you want to talk to Brenda Woburn?”

“I wasn’t there as a cop. It was a personal matter.”

“After midnight. In the ICU. The woman’s recovering from a gunshot, surgery—and you stop by for a chat? A woman I don’t think you met before that moment?”

John didn’t reply. He studied a picture of Naomi on her seventh birthday. She wore a tam-o’-shanter. One of her enduring enthusiasms was hats. He cherished Naomi for many reasons, but certainly on his top ten list was the intensity of her love for the world and the passionate delight that she could take in the most mundane things, almost a rejoicing.

“John, there’s major heat on this. One of our own kills his partner, four other people, then himself. The press is foaming at the mouth. This isn’t my case alone. There’s a little task force. Sharp and Tanner—they’re part of it.”

John turned from the photographs. “Do they know I was at the hospital?”

“Not yet. But I might have to tell them. John, why are you on a thirty-day leave?”

“A family thing. Like I told you.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d lie to me.”

John met his stare. “It’s not a lie. It’s just incomplete.”

“Ken Sharp implied you tried to horn in on the Lucas case.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“Just that if you come back from leave, he won’t work with you on the Tane investigation. He wanted me clear on that.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“All he said was he doesn’t want a repeat of the Lucas house, doesn’t want to go into Tane’s place and find you cooking dinner.”

The “cooking dinner” reference was a euphemism, a suggestion that John had been cooking the crime scene, planting evidence. Ken might have reached that conclusion after talking to the orderly, Coleman Hanes, at the state hospital, who suspected that, in spite of the boy’s confession, John believed Billy Lucas must be innocent.

Lionel said, “Were you really in the Lucas house unofficially?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell? Why?”

John glanced at the hall beyond the open study door. He didn’t want to be overheard. “Let’s go outside.”

The air was cool, but the day chilled only in the shadows. They sat in the sun, on wrought-iron chairs, at a table on the terrace.

As succinctly as he had laid out his case for Nelson Burchard, John told Lionel about the Blackwood murders twenty years earlier, about the loss of his family.

Lionel did not respond with the cloying earnestness of Burchard. He knew that pity could be an insult. He said only “Shit,” and in that one vulgarity, he expressed genuine sympathy and a touching depth of friendship.

As John listed the uncanny similarities between the recent Lucas murders and the Valdane-family massacre two decades earlier, Lionel listened with interest. But when the discussion turned to the fact that three of the Sollenburgs had been shot, that twenty years later three of the Woburns were shot as well, and when John noted that in each instance the daughter was murdered last, Lionel blinked in confusion until he blinked himself into a frown.

“You think there’s some link between these cases?”

“They were thirty-three days apart, like back then. I warned Burchard—thirty-three days.”

“Thirty-three days could be coincidence.”

“It isn’t.”

The sky was pale, the sun a white instead of a yolk, as if a high, finely diffused pollution muted the natural colors.

Leaning forward, arms on the table, Lionel said, “What’re you trying to tell me? I don’t get it. Help me make the leap.”

Although he risked sounding like a man seeking a psychiatric-disability pension, John was desperate for an ally. “Thirty-three more days will put us at November seventh. Blackwood’s third family was the Paxtons. Mother, father, two sons, two daughters.”

“You mean this is somehow copycat stuff? Alton Blackwood’s crimes redone?”

A faint breeze quivered the scarlet leaves on the half-sered autumn grass, but neither the cascading boughs of the deodar cedar nor the rose brambles on the arbor stirred whatsoever.

“If a third family is murdered on November seventh, then the fourth will be on December tenth.”

Lionel shook his head. “There were two different killers. Billy Lucas, Andy Tane. They’re both dead.”

The glass top on the wrought-iron table reflected the faded sky, a hawk gliding in a narrowing gyre.

“And in the Sollenburg case,” Lionel continued, “in all those cases back then, a girl was raped and tortured.”

“Billy Lucas raped and tortured his sister, Celine.”

“But Davinia Woburn wasn’t.”

“Reese Salsetto was going to do the Woburn family. If Brenda hadn’t shot him, he would have shot her and the son. Then he would have done to the girl precisely what Alton Blackwood did to Sharon Sollenburg.”

“I’m still lost. You can’t seriously be saying Billy, Reese, and Andy conspired to re-create the Blackwood crimes?”

“No. They didn’t have to know one another if each of them had a secret partner and if that partner was the same in each instance.”

“But there’s no evidence of any perp but Billy in the Lucas house. And for sure, nobody but Andy Tane went out the window with that poor girl.”

“Nobody we could see,” John said.

Exasperated, Lionel leaned back in his chair. “Who are you, man, and what’ve you done with my plain-talking partner?”

Watching the circling hawk reflected in the table, John said, “I went up to the state hospital twice to see Billy Lucas.”

“Well, that’ll put a bee up Ken Sharp’s ass.”

“He knows. The first visit, Billy called me Johnny, though he’d been told only my last name.”

“We don’t need Sherlock to figure out that one.”

“That night he called me on an unlisted number he hadn’t been given. Using a phone they say he didn’t possess. He said something to me that was word for word something Blackwood said right before I killed him. Something I’ve never told anyone. Something only Alton Blackwood could know.”

For a long moment, Lionel was as silent as the pale sky and the white sun and the gliding hawk in the glass.

At last he said, “I don’t do X-Files cases, and neither do you. Come in from the Twilight Zone—okay?”

John looked up, met his eyes. “How do you explain something as weird as what Andy Tane did?”

“I don’t know yet, but I will eventually. I found a connection between Reese Salsetto and Andy. The answer is there. I just have to work it out.”

Surprised, John said, “What connection?”

“Salsetto was a comer, a pusher and booster and grifter and paper-hanger. You name a scam, he was working it. And he had a fixer list as long as King Kong’s dick—cops, all kinds of city officials. I found a ledger under the false bottom in his nightstand drawer. He recorded every bribe he paid—amount, date, time, place, to whom. In half the cases, when the payoff was made in a parking lot or a park or anywhere outside, Salsetto had someone on his team get a photo of the envelope being passed. If he ever needed to turn state’s evidence to save himself, he figured to have so much crap on so many people that a prosecutor wouldn’t just cut him a deal for no prison time, he’d adopt him and call him son. Andy Tane is on that list a lot, and so is his former partner, Vin Wasco. I think maybe somehow Salsetto’s sister Brenda and her husband were involved in something with Reese, and with Tane.”

“They weren’t like that.”

“Maybe they were. Maybe they were in something with Reese and Andy, and it went wrong in a big way. Reese lost his cool, which he had a habit of. Reese dead, Andy Tane sees his world falling apart, too, and he goes for revenge and a quick exit, something like that.”

John looked at the sky, and the hawk was gone. He had only seen it reflected in the table. He wondered if there had been a real hawk or only the reflection of one.

“I know it sounds good to you now,” John said, “but it won’t come together that way. The hinges aren’t where you think they are.”

“I’d rather spend my time looking for hinges than for a ghost or whatever it is you’re talking about.”

“If another family’s murdered on November seventh, what’ll we do then?”

“Keep looking for hinges. If your explanation is right, what could we do anyway?”

“Maybe nothing,” John acknowledged.

Lionel surveyed the big yard, lingered on the deodar cedar. He looked tired, not merely weary but worn down and prematurely aged by a life in Homicide.

When he looked at John again, he said, “Listen, man, that’s a hell of a thing you’ve been carrying with you all these years, your whole family killed. You shared it with anybody till now?”

“Nicky knows. She always has. Not the kids. Only Nicky until Burchard and you. But I didn’t go as far with Burchard as suggesting … that it’s Blackwood himself again. Do you have to tell him?”

Lionel shook his head. “No. But how much longer are you on leave?”

“About ten days.”

“Maybe you should extend it till you work this out for yourself. Till you get your head straight about it. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll ask for another thirty days.”

Lionel started to slide his chair back from the table, but then he pulled it in again and leaned once more with his arms on the thick glass top. “I feel like I let you down.”

“You never have. You didn’t now.”

“Couldn’t be easy for you to say what you’re really thinking when you’re thinking something as far out as this.”

“I had to take a deep breath and swallow hard,” John admitted.

“See, the problem is, I remember all those old movies, they were old even when I was a kid, where something goes bump in the night, and it’s not even something supernatural, but the black guy always says ‘Feets don’t fail me now,’ and does a fast shuffle for someplace safe. Used to embarrass the hell out of me when I saw that.”

“Me too.”

“So I won’t be what I can’t be.”

“Tell your mom I think she did an amazing job.”

“You mean, considering what she had to work with.”

John smiled. “It’s a flat-out miracle.”

As they rose from their chairs, a breeze sprang up. All across the yard, fallen leaves slid and tumbled over one another, adding to drifts of leaves against the rose arbor and against the fence between the yard and the wooded ravine. It was just a breeze.