What the Night Knows

5

USING TWO SPOONS, MARION DUNNAWAY SCOOPED DOUGH from the steel mixing bowl, deftly shaped it into a ball, and deposited it on the baking sheet, where eight others were arranged in rows.

“If I’d ever had children and now had grandchildren, I’d never let them near the Internet unless I was sitting beside them.”

She kept a tidy kitchen. Yellow-and-white curtains framed a view of the storm and seemed to bring order even to the chaotic weather.

“There’s too much sick stuff too easily accessed. If they see it when they’re young, the seed of an obsession might be planted.”

She scooped up more dough, spoon clicked against spoon, and a tenth cookie-to-be appeared almost magically on the Teflon sheet.

Marion had retired from the army after serving thirty-six years as a surgical nurse. Short, compact, sturdy, she radiated competence. Her strong hands attended to every task with brisk efficiency.

“Say a boy is just twelve when he comes across such trash. The mind of a twelve-year-old is highly fertile soil, Detective Calvino.”

“Highly,” John agreed from his chair at the dinette table.

“Any seed planted in it is likely to thrive, which is why you have to guard against an ill wind that might blow in a weed pip.”

Under a helmet of thick white hair, Marion’s face was that of a fifty-year-old, though she was sixty-eight. Her smile was sweet, and John suspected her laugh would be hearty, though he doubted that he would ever hear it.

Warming his hands around his coffee mug, he said, “You think that’s what happened to Billy—some weed pip from the Internet?”

Having pressed an eleventh ball of dough to the baking sheet, she said nothing as she shaped the final cookie in the batch.

Then she raised her face to the window, staring toward the house next door. John assumed she was seeing beyond that place, imagining the house two doors away—the Lucas residence, the house of death.

“Damned if I know. They were a solid family. Good people. Billy was always polite. The nicest boy. So very considerate of his mother after the accident that put her in the wheelchair.”

She opened the oven. With a quilted mitt, she took out a tray of finished cookies and put it on the sinkside cutting board to cool.

A flood of hot air poured the aromas of chocolate and coconut and pecans through the kitchen. Curiously, instead of making John’s mouth water, the smell briefly nauseated him.

Marion said, “I served in field hospitals, battle zones. Front-line emergency surgeries. Saw a lot of violence, too much death.”

She slid the tray of neatly arranged dough balls into the oven, closed the door, and took off the quilted mitt.

“I got so I could tell at first sight which ones would survive their wounds, which wouldn’t. I could see death in their faces.”

From a drawer near the refrigerator, she extracted a key and brought it to the table.

“I never saw death in Billy. Not a glimpse of it. The Internet theory is just twiddle-twaddle, Detective Calvino. Just the jabber of an old woman who’s afraid to admit some evil can’t be explained.”

She gave him the key, which dangled from a beaded chain with a plastic cat charm. The cat was a grinning golden tabby.

Billy’s parents loved cats. They’d had two spayed British spotted shorthairs, green-eyed and frisky, named Posh and Fluff.

When the killing started, Posh and Fluff fled through a cat flap in the kitchen door. A neighbor, at the house across the street from the Lucases, found them shivering and crying under his back porch.

Pocketing the key, John rose. “Thank you for the coffee, ma’am.”

“I should have thought to turn the key in the day it happened.”

“No harm done,” he assured her.

Wondering if the Lucases might have traded house keys with a trusted neighbor, John had that morning made four cold calls before hearing what he hoped to hear from Marion Dunnaway.

“Let me give you some cookies for those kids you mentioned,” she said. “The earlier batches are cool.”

He sensed that he would disappoint her if he declined.

She put six cookies in a OneZip bag and escorted John to the front door. “I think of going up there to see Billy one day, if he’s allowed visitors. But what would I say?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing to say. You’re better off remembering him as he was. He’s very different now. You can do nothing for him.”

He had left his raincoat on the front-porch swing. He shrugged into it, put up the hood, went to his car at the curb, and drove two doors east to the Lucas house, where he parked in the driveway.

Perhaps an hour of daylight remained before the rain washed darkness down the day.

Fat snails, with eye stalks questing, crossed the wet front walkway, venturing from one grassy realm to another. John avoided crushing them underfoot.

To accommodate Sandra Lucas in her wheelchair, the porch offered both steps and a ramp.

He took off his raincoat, shook it, and folded it over his left arm because the only other place to put it was a glider with stained yellow cushions. After Billy finished with his sister and called 911, he had come to the front porch and had sat on the glider, naked and drenched in blood.

In most jurisdictions, after attaining the age of fourteen, children are presumed to have sufficient capacity to form criminal intent. Neither moral nor emotional insanity—as distinguished from mental—exempts the perpetrator from responsibility for his crimes.

To the first two police officers on the scene, Billy offered his sister for ten dollars each and told them where she could be found. “Just leave twenty bucks on the nightstand,” he said. “And don’t have a cigarette after. This house is a no-smoking zone.”

Now the police-department seal had been peeled off the front door. Two days previously, long after the criminalists collected trace evidence and prints, after a review of that evidence supported Billy’s confession in every detail, after the boy was evaluated by psychiatrists, and after he was remanded to the state hospital under a preliminary finding of insanity to be reaffirmed or reconsidered in sixty days, the house ceased to be an active crime scene.

No one from the department would have come by merely to remove the seals from the exterior doors. Because the Lucases had no family nearby, perhaps an attorney, serving as executor, had been here to review the condition of the house.

John used the key with the dangling cat charm. He went inside, closed the door, and stood in the foyer, listening to this home that had become a slaughterhouse.

He possessed no authority to enter these premises. Technically, the case file remained open until Billy could be evaluated in sixty days, but the investigation was inactive. Anyway, this had never been John’s assignment.

If he’d been unable to discover a neighbor with a key, his only alternative would have been to force entry. He would have done it.

With his back against the front door, he sensed that someone waited for him in one of the surrounding rooms, but this was a false perception. In other murder houses, after the bodies were removed and the evidence collected, when he returned alone to consider the scene in solitude, he usually experienced this disturbing impression of a presence looming, but it always proved to be unfounded.