Cold stabbed Jack high on his right thigh, so cold it burned. He clutched at the spot and felt a frozen lump in the pocket. The key ring! He clenched his teeth as he dropped to his knees—God, it hurt—and clawed at the pocket, reaching in, trying to grab the key ring but the skin of his fingers stuck to it like a wet tongue to a frozen wrought iron fence. He peeled his fingers away, losing some skin, and yanked at the fabric, pulling it out, inverting the pocket. Finally the Roger Rabbit figure appeared and tumbled toward the floor.
But it never landed. Instead it dipped and then rose and darted toward the center of the cellar. There it hovered in the air. Jack saw a rime of frost form along the figure's limbs, then the head, finally engulfing the trunk.
A high keening wail began to echo the air, growing in pitch and volume as Jack pushed himself back up to his feet. The frost thickened on the Roger Rabbit figure, and Jack thought he heard the plastic creak and crinkle as it became brittle from the intense cold.
Suddenly the wail became a screech of rage as Roger's head snapped off and hurtled across the cellar. It struck one of the granite blocks and shattered into powder that scattered and swirled like drifting snow. Then an arm snapped off and flashed in the opposite direction, just missing Charlie's head. Jack ducked as an arm narrowly missed him.
More pieces flew as the frenzied screech rose in pitch and volume. And then there were no more pieces and yet still the enraged howl rose until Jack had to cover his ears. The sound became a physical thing, battering him until…
It stopped.
As suddenly as the sound had begun, silence returned. The sense of presence dissipated as well until Jack felt that the cellar was again occupied by just the three of them.
He shook his head to relieve the ringing in his ears. It didn't work.
Lyle and Charlie looked shaken, but Jack felt oddly calm. Deadly calm.
"What the hell was that all about?" Lyle said.
"Yeah," Charlie said. "What'd you have in your pocket? Looked like that cartoon rabbit…"
"Roger Rabbit."
"Yeah."
Lyle snorted a laugh and shook his head. "Roger Rabbit. Just the sort of thing to drive the average demon into a frenzy."
Charlie took a step toward his brother. "Warning you, Lyle—"
Jack jumped in. "Tara Portman's father told Gia that Tara was a Roger Rabbit fan. I was wondering if that key ring might be hers."
"Judging from what just happened," Lyle said, bending and rubbing his finger through the powdery remains of one of Roger's legs, "I think she answered you with a very big yes."
"That she did," Jack said, nodding. "And she also identified her killer."
But his satisfaction at solving the mystery was marred by the unanswered question of how and why he'd come to be involved.
12
Gia sat in a pew three-quarters back from the altar under the vaulted ceiling and waited for peace.
She'd taken a slow walk from Sutton Square down to St Patrick's Cathedral. She wasn't sure why she'd come, hadn't consciously headed this way. She'd simply gone for a walk as a break from painting and found herself on Fifth Avenue. She ambled past St. Pat's and then doubled back to visit, hoping to find some of the serenity and inner peace religion was supposed to bring. So far it remained elusive.
The sense of isolation was welcome, though. Here in this huge, stone-wrapped space she felt cut off from the bustling reality just beyond the tall oak doors and insulated from the need that called to her from that house in Astoria.
She sat alone and watched the gaggles of tourists wandering in and out, the Catholics blessing themselves with holy water and lighting candles, the rest standing around and gawking at the gothic arches, the stations of the cross spaced along the side walls, the larger-than-life statues, the giant crucifix, the gilded altar.
The images drew Gia back to her years in Our Lady of Hope grammar school in Ottumwa. Not a particularly Catholic town, but then Iowa wasn't a particularly Catholic state. There'd been enough Catholic kids to fill the local church school though, and keep the nuns of the convent busy as teachers. Of all that black-robed crew, she best remembered Sister Mary Barbara—known to all the kids as Sister Mary Barbed-wire. Not because she'd liked the nun; quite the opposite: she'd scared the hell out of Gia.
Sister Mary Barbed-wire had been the Catholic equivalent of a Baptist hellfire preacher, always harping on the awful punishments awaiting sinners, all the horrors the God of Love would inflict upon those who disappointed Him. Everlasting suffering for missing mass on Sunday, or failing to make your Easter duty. Little Gia bought the whole package, living in terror of dying with a mortal sin on her soul.
Luckily Our Lady of Hope hadn't had a high school; that allowed Gia to escape to the secular den of iniquity known as the public school system. But she'd still remained a practicing Catholic, attending CCD classes and CYO dances.
Sometime during the eighties, however, she drifted away and never returned. Not that she stopped believing in God. She couldn't buy into atheism, or even agnosticism. God existed, she was sure. She was also pretty sure He didn't care much about what went on here. Maybe He watched, but He certainly didn't act.
To her child's eyes the Old Testament God had appeared stern and imposing; now He seemed like a cranky, petulant adolescent with poor impulse control, creating cataclysms, sending plagues, striking down an entire nation's first-born males. She found the New Testament God much more appealing, but somewhere along the way the whole redemption and damnation thing had stopped making sense to her. You didn't ask to be born but once you were you had to toe the belief line or spend eternity suffering in hell. Easy to believe back in the Old Testament days when He burned bushes, parted seas, and sent commandments on stone tablets. But these days God had become remote, no longer weighing in on human affairs, yet still demanding faith. It didn't seem fair.
Of course, if You're God, You don't have to be fair. You hold all the marbles. What You say goes.
Still…
Gia had tried to come back to the church after Vicky was born. A child should have some moral foundation to build on, and the church seemed a tried and true place to start. In the back of her mind too had been the idea that if Gia returned to the fold, God would protect Vicky.
But Gia couldn't make it work. And it was terrifyingly obvious that God did not protect children. They died from brain tumors and leukemias and other cancers, from being run over, shot, electrocuted, dropped from buildings, incinerated in house fires, and in other uncountable, unimaginable ways. Clearly innocence was not enough to earn God's protection.
So where was God?
Did the Born Agains have it right? Jesus was their personal savior who watched their every move and answered their prayers? They prayed to Jesus that their old jalopy would start on a cold morning and if it did they praised Him and gave Him thanks for the rest of the day. Gia couldn't get comfortable with a view of God that turned the Creator of the Universe into some sort of cosmic errand boy for His True Believers. Children were starving, Tara Portmans were being abducted and murdered, political prisoners were being tortured, wives were being abused, but God ignored their pleas for relief in order to answer the True Believers' prayers for good weather on the day of the church picnic. Did that make sense?
Yet when she considered the Born Agains she knew—only a few, but good people who seemed to practice what they preached—and saw their serenity, their inner peace, she envied them. They could say, "Let go, let God," with a true, unshakable confidence that God would take care of them and everything would work out in the end. Gia wanted that tranquility for herself, craved it, but the ability—perhaps the hubris—to believe she mattered to the Creator of the Universe and could have His ear remained beyond her.
At the other extreme was the God who ignited the Big Bang, then turned His back and walked away, never to be seen again.
Gia sensed the truth lay somewhere between. But where?
And where did Tara Portman fit i
n all this? Had she come back on her own, or had she been sent back? And why? Why did Gia feel this connection to her?
Gia sighed and rose. Whatever the reasons, she wasn't going to find them here.
She stepped out into the bright afternoon sunshine and headed home. When she reached Sutton Square she ran into Rosa, the Silverman's maid. Their townhouse was two doors down from Gia.
"Did that policeman find you?" Rosa said. She had a broad face and a thick body, and was dressed in her after-work street clothes.
Gia's heart froze. "What policeman?"
"The one who knock on your door little while 'go."
Oh, God! Vicky! Something's happened!
She fumbled in her bag for her keys. "What did he say? What did he want?"
"He ask if you home. He ask if you leave you little girl home alone when you go out."
"What?" She found the keys, singled out the one for the front door. "Did he say why he wanted to know?"
"No. I tol' him no, never. I say little miss away at camp. He ask what camp, I say I don' know."
Gia's knees weakened with relief. For a moment there she'd thought the camp had sent a cop to deliver terrible news about Vicky. But if he hadn't even known she was away…
Wait a minute. What was he doing here then? Why was a cop asking about Vicky?
"Rosa, are you sure he was a cop?"
"Oh sure. He have cop car and…" She moved her hands up and down the front of her body. "You know…"
"Uniform?"
"Uh-huh! Tha's it. All blue. He was cop, yes."
"Did you happen to see his badge number?"
The maid shook her head. "No. I no think to look." She narrowed her eyes. "Now that I think, I don' remember seeing no badge."
"Did he mention me or Vicky by name?"
"No… I don' thin' so."
"Thank you, Rosa." Gia missed her first try on inserting the key, made it on the second. "I'm going to look into this."
Once inside the first thing Gia did was call the camp. No, they hadn't called the NYPD. Vicky and everyone else at the camp were fine.
Next call, her local precinct, the Seventeenth. No, they hadn't had any calls to send someone over to Sutton Square. He might have come from another precinct, but no one could say why.
Gia hung up, relieved that Vicky was safe, but unsettled by anyone, cop or not, asking about her daughter.
Had he been an impostor? No, Rosa had said he'd arrived in a cop car.
Gia thought of Tara Portman. What if Tara had been picked up by a police car? A cop saying her mother had been hurt and he'd take her to her. Vicky would fall for that. Any kid would.
Whoever the cop was, he hadn't learned anything other than the fact that Vicky was away at camp. And he didn't know which camp because Rosa couldn't tell him.
She wanted to call Jack, but what could he do? He was the last person on earth to have an inside line into what the NYPD might be up to.
All she could do was pray that—
Gia frowned. Pray… that was what you did when trouble came knocking. Even if you'd lost your faith, old habits died hard.
She'd pray that it was all a mix-up and the cop had the wrong address.
That would do until Jack got home.
13
"Let me see if I've got this sequence down right," Lyle said.
They had just about all the paneling stripped from the wall now, and were working on the bracing studs. They still hadn't found any loose stones. Every one so far had been mortared tight to its neighbors.
Something about these stones gave Jack the creeps. They gave off an alien vibe that made him want to cover them again, hide them from human sight. They didn't belong here, and it almost seemed they knew it and wanted to be back where they'd come from—Romania, wasn't it? The ones that had had their cross inlays ripped out were the worst. The empty pockets looked like dead eye sockets, staring at him.
As they'd worked Jack had told them how he'd come into possession of Tara Portman's key ring—leaving out names, of course, and sidestepping mention of his knife fight with Eli Bellitto.
Lyle began counting off on his fingers. "First you meet Junie Moon, you bring her here, you step across the threshold, and awaken Tara Portman. Two days later someone hires you to watchdog someone he says is his brother but who you later learn is an only child. In the course of guarding the brotherless man you snag a key ring off him which just happens to belong to Tara Portman." He shook his head. "Talk about wheels within wheels."
And no more coincidences, Jack thought glumly, wondering at the purpose behind all this. And why was Gia involved? This whole situation was giving him a very unsettled feeling.
Lyle pried a Frisbee-size remnant of paneling from a two-by-four stud and scaled it onto the growing junk pile at the back end of the cellar.
"But just having Tara's key ring doesn't make this guy her killer. He could have found it on the sidewalk or picked it up at a garage sale."
Jack wondered how much he could tell these two. Since they lived on his side of the law, he decided to trust them with a little more.
"What if I told you that I saw him snatch a kid while I was watchdogging him?"
Charlie gave him a wide-eyed stare. "You frontin' me, right?"
Jack shook his head. "I wish. And if that's not enough, this guy has a whole cabinet full of kids' junk. Like a trophy case."
"Oh, man." Lyle had a queasy look. "Oh, man. What happened to that snatched kid?"
"I unsnatched him."
"Yo! Yo!" Charlie pointed a waggling finger at Jack. "The Vietnamese kid! That was you?"
"I'd rather not say."
"It was you!" Charlie grinned. "You a hero, G."
Jack shrugged and turned back to the stud he'd been prying loose from the blocks. Words like "hero" made him uncomfortable. Like "art," it tended to be thrown around a little too easily these days.
"You'd've done the same. Anybody would have." He shifted the talk away from himself. "I'll bet anything there's a link between this guy and the late, great Dmitri Menelaus. If I'm right, I'm afraid we can count on finding more than just Tara Portman's remains down here."
Which would work right into Lyle's PR plans.
Lyle leaned against the wall. "A serial killer." He didn't sound happy.
"More than one," Jack said. "A ring of them maybe. If I can establish a link with Dmitri…"
"What then?"
He found a groove between two blocks behind the two-by-four and slipped the pry bar into it. To the squealing accompaniment of protesting nails and the crackle of splintering fir, he wrenched the stud free with a vicious yank.
"A few people are going to wish they'd never been born."
Lyle stared at him. "Someone hire you to do that?"
"No."
Jack still wanted to know who'd hired him to watch Eli Bellitto, but no, no one would be paying him for what was going to happen to Bellitto and his crew.
"Then why're you going after them? I thought you were a pay-or-play guy. Fee for service, and all that. Why the freebie?"
"Because."
"That's not an answer."
"Yeah, it is."
"Praise the Lord!" Charlie said. His eyes glowed like a miniature sun had lit in his head. "Praise the Lord! You see what's goin' down here, don'tcha?"
Lyle said, "I'm almost afraid to hear this."
"Jack, you an instrument of God."
"Yeah?" He'd been called a lot of things since he'd started his fix-it business, but never that.
"True that! The guy hired you to hound this killer? A messenger from God, yo. He point you at the killer so you be there when that little kid need you."
"Really. What about all those other kids this guy's done? The ones like Tara Portman and who knows how many others?"
"Dawg, don't you see? God sent you here to even the score."
"You think so," Jack said.
Lyle laughed. "Hey, that's one ass-backwards god you've got there, bro. Where was he
when Tara needed him? I mean, he's not paying attention. If he was, there'd be no score to even. Too little, too late, if you ask me."
Charlie glowered at his brother. "Didn't ask you."
"And what happened to this demon you were talking about?" Lyle said. "First you tell us we've got a demon sent by Satan, and now we've got Jack sent by god. Which is it?"
Jack wanted to tell Lyle to ease up on his brother, but it wasn't his place. What was it with Lyle anyway? He seemed wound as tight as that clock Jack had bought yesterday.
"That's it." Charlie threw down his pry bar. "I'm outta here."
"No way. We have a deal. Two days."
"Yo, I ain't standin' here listenin' to you trash the Lord. Blasphemy wasn't no part of the deal."
Jack watched them, wondering what the hell they were talking about.
Lyle held up his hands. "All right, I'm sorry. My bad. I was out of line. It's been a tough day. Truce, okay?"
"Truce sounds good," Jack said. "Let's keep at this. We've only got a little ways to go before it's all down."
"A'ight," Charlie said. "We keep at it."
"If we're going to do that, can we change the music?" The endless progression of cuts from Miles and Bird and now Coltrane was getting on his nerves.
Lyle frowned. "Don't tell me you don't like 'Trane."
"I guess I'm not cool enough for jazz. Or maybe not smart enough."
"How 'bout Gospel?" Charlie said with a sly grin. "I got a whole collection upstairs."
Jack leaned on the wall. "You know… if it's got words and melody, I'm willing."
"Why not a break from music?" Lyle said. "Just the sound of men hard at work."
Jack attacked another stud. "I can handle that."
After a minute or so Jack sensed eyes on the back of his neck and turned to find Lyle doing his stare-squint thing again. This was the third or fourth time he'd caught him.
"Do you find me attractive, Lyle?"
Lyle blinked. "Not at all. You're not my type."