“Listen, partner,” Zach said. He had to end this. He laid his hand on the fine French serge on Goulart’s shoulder. “I got a CI to see on this Paz case, maybe a link to Abend. I gotta go and meet with him. You call me right away if you hear anything from your doctor.”
He could’ve slapped the guy and gotten a similar reaction. Goulart’s head jerked back and his mouth opened and he spread his hands again: What the fuck? What the flaming fuck?
“That’s it? You’re gonna walk out on me?”
“I gotta do this, man. Come on!”
“All that garbage on Margo.”
“It’s not garbage.”
“You know it is. And then you’re heading out alone again on Abend? Because of that bitch upstairs? What she said?”
“It’s a CI. I can’t bring you. It’d spook him.”
Goulart’s lips tightened and his hands jerked out again, and he said “So that’s where we are.”
“For Christ’s sake, Goulart. You’re getting it all wrong.”
But he wasn’t, and they both knew it.
Zach drifted toward the door and Goulart went on standing there, just as he was, arms lifted, lips tight. Zach felt bad about it but hey, last night, he’d ripped his mistress’s head off, so there was a lot to feel bad about: it was all a matter of priorities at this point.
“Seriously, call me if you hear anything,” he said again.
And he left Goulart standing there. Headed out to pick up the Crown Vic. Headed out to the Guyland.
21
CARNAGE
All through the long drive, Zach was haunted.
He was haunted by the radio news, for one thing. Even with the violence in Europe—even with Islamists rioting in Amsterdam, neo-Nazis battling neo-Communists in Berlin and London, the burning of a synagogue in Paris with fourteen people dying while the flics looked on—even with all that, the stations couldn’t pass over a good heiress-killed-by-a-bear story. Hell, they led with it, as if they thought it was the only part of the broadcast their audience would give a damn about. During the two-hour journey out to Sea View, Zach heard Jack Heatherton give a tearful press conference: “No expense will be spared in finding out the truth about my daughter’s death.” He heard experts discussing the anomalous aggression of bears in autumn (experts always had an explanation after the fact for something they would have deemed impossible before it). He heard the local police chief put out a call for anyone with information to come forward: “If you were present at the time of Miss Heatherton’s death, you are not a suspect. We know this was an animal attack. We just want to talk to you.” All of this haunted him as he drove.
And he was haunted by Grace. By thoughts of Grace, by thoughts of what Grace might discover. She didn’t follow the news all that much, but a story like this . . . ? A woman killed in her own home by an animal? How could she miss it? Images of his wife kept popping into his mind. The moment when she would see Margo’s face on television or online. The moment when she would recognize that this was the very woman Zach had spoken to outside their church. . . . All the questions she would ask him. All the lies he would have to tell her. . . . This haunted him too.
And he was haunted by ghosts. The actual presence of the dead. Margo, continuously. Those inescapable hollow eyes inside him. Look what you did to me, Zach. Look at my face. I was so beautiful. Look what you did. . . . That was bad enough; but then, from time to time, there were the others. Standing by the side of the road, watching him pass. It was truly unnerving.
Right outside Great Neck, not far into his trip, he spotted Gretchen Dankl smoking a cigarette beside the hedge that lined a golf course. It made his heart leap in his chest when he recognized her. He swiveled his head to look back at her, but she was already gone—and when he looked forward again, he had to brake hard to keep from plowing into the pickup just ahead of him.
That was only the beginning. Out in the autumn scrublands midway, he was startled by the sight of a man framed against a highway sound barrier. The man was wearing clothes from an age gone by: a gaudy blue coat with what looked like gold and silver embroidery. He watched the Crown Vic with an unwavering stare and a mournful countenance. Zach had no idea who he was, but he knew he had been dead a long time.
A bit farther on, where the Island became flat farmlands pocked with enclaves of small houses, there was another man he’d never seen before, this one standing shin-deep in the brush. He was wearing an old-fashioned black three-piece suit with a long coat, like a character in one of those British historical dramas Grace liked to watch on TV. It was the costume that made Zach turn to look at him; and when their eyes met, he realized that this was another one, another specter.
As badly as these apparitions rattled him, he understood somehow why they were there. A whole cursed history was in his bloodstream now, the guilt of sins he hadn’t committed, the memories of people he had never met and of events that had taken place before he was born. These roadside shadows were but intimations of what he didn’t want to know he knew. And there’d be more of them, he suspected. Phantoms, visions, nightmares, each more substantial and tormenting than the last.
Even as he was considering this—and even as the radio newsman was yammering at the edge of his consciousness—he got a whiff of earthworms and rotting meat. He looked into his rearview, terrified that he might see the executioner sitting in the back seat again—and he did! There he was. Zach nearly swerved into the next lane. By the time he got the car back under his control, the ghost was gone and the smell was dissipating. But Zach had to get off the highway for a few minutes to calm himself.
He parked in a little neighborhood near the service road. He sat behind the wheel with his eyes shut, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. He told himself that this would pass. He’d track Abend down. He’d “confront” the dagger, whatever that meant. After that, he’d be free to turn himself in or die or . . . do something to make this stop. Meanwhile, though—Jesus! The guilt and horror were like thrashing, ravenous animals in him. Guilt and horror—and grief too. Because he’d lost something precious, something he’d barely known he had: he’d lost his sense of himself as a good person. Even death wouldn’t restore that. Nothing would.
Before he got back on the road, he raised his eyes and looked around. Out the windshield, down the sidewalk. Out the window, at the windows of the houses nearby. In the rearview mirror, expecting to see a dead man’s eyes staring back at him. There was no one there, no one anywhere. All the ghosts were gone, for the moment. But they’d be back. This was what it was going to be like from now on.
He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb and got back on the highway.
Another forty-five minutes of haunted driving and he was near Westhampton Beach again. He made his way to the winding oceanfront road that led to Angela Bose’s driveway. A screen of trees was planted along the road’s shoulder. Zach caught only glimpses of Sea View through the branches. All the same, by the time he reached the estate’s brick entrance, he knew that something was wrong.
He slowed the Crown Vic. He came down the cypress-lined driveway at a crawl. He was on alert, his eyes scanning the area for anyone—anything—in motion. But that was just it. That was what bothered him. Nothing was in motion. Nothing human, anyway. A heavy, pewter-colored sky hung stagnant over the fountain out front. The flowers around the fountain stirred in the breeze, but the fountain itself wasn’t flowing. The lawn moved in the wind too, and the branches of the black oaks rattled. But the windows of the house behind the branches—they were dark on all three stories. The silver-blue Bentley was nowhere in sight. And as Zach drove closer, he saw that the front door was standing ajar.
The Crown Vic made a lot of noise rolling over the gravel, so when Zach stopped, it seemed very quiet inside the car for a moment. Then he stepped out and there was the wind noise and the noise from the ocean and the seawater tang of the ocean carried by the wind. But underneath all that, there was a deeper silence and a sense of em
ptiness and the faintest trace of that smell he remembered from his first visit: the smell of blood.
He walked cautiously toward the door, his feet crunching on the gravel. His eyes kept scanning the area. Nothing was moving but the waves on the water behind the house, and the seabirds sailing past in the overcast sky.
“Hello? Anyone home?” he called in through the open door. He got the answer he expected—no answer. He pushed the door in and stepped over the threshold.
Inside, everything was still. He closed the door to shut out the noise of wind and sea, then stood on the brink of the foyer and listened. Nothing. He noticed a light patina of sand lying on the parquet. The door must have been open for days. No lights on anywhere. Shadows draped the corridor that led toward the back room. Shadows folded over the switchback stairs. His first thought was to head up to the second story. Check the bedroom. The bath. But no. There was nothing up there. No one. He could feel it. Smell it.
There was something, though. Something. Someone. Somewhere. Down the hall. In the shadows. Close.
It was at this point that he drew his weapon.
Gun held low with both hands, he edged over the parquet and the Persian rugs and into the back room with its picture-window view of the beach: pewter sky over a muddy green ocean, the water seizing, rising, tumbling, white-capped, foam-splayed, violent. He edged past the window, down another hall, a darker hall, with a doorway of gray light at the end. Angela Bose must have abandoned this place right after Goulart and he had questioned her. She had run for it, basically. But why? Because she looked at him, at Zach, and saw that he knew she was lying? No. She was a wealthy woman with access to the kind of lawyers who could easily protect her from the likes of him. Plus she was prideful and—his guess—she would have thought she could run rings around him with her lies, whether he believed them or not. And she was probably right about that too.
He edged through the shadows toward that gray door up ahead. It was the kitchen door, he could see now. He could see the cabinets and counters in the gray daylight, the granite table centered on the darker parquet. And now he caught an even stronger whiff of . . . what? He drew a long breath in through his nostrils. Death. Blood. Yes, and something else. Something alive. Something tense, waiting for him. All across the surface of his flesh, he felt now that he was not alone.
He stepped into the kitchen. Surveyed the still and silent room. There was another open doorway across from him. Through it, he saw a back hall and another door and he thought: There. He crossed the kitchen quickly and went through the hall to the second door.
He unwrapped his left hand from the pistol grip and used it to pull the door all the way open.
Cellar stairs, down into deeper darkness.
“Shit,” he whispered.
There was a light switch, at least. Did it work? He flicked it up and—yes—a pale yellow glow spread over the bottom of the staircase. He started down the steps crabwise, both hands on the gun again. He felt now as if his skin had flipped and his nerves were on the outside—he was that sure that he was walking into trouble.
He stepped off the bottom stair. Stepped down onto the tiled floor of the basement. He caught that smell again, that smell that he had smelled the last time he’d been here. That atmosphere so engorged with blood, it was like being inside a tick on a dog. Before, he had thought the smell was coming off Angela Bose herself. But here it was again. Did that mean he was about to find her? Find her body? He was about to find something, that was for sure.
To the right was a stone archway into a corridor. He stepped to the left instead, into an open room. There was an elegant wooden bar with cushioned stools. Bottles of wine in wall racks, bottles of whiskey on glass shelves. A television embedded in the wall. He swept his gun barrel over the corners and hidden places and the space behind the bar. No one there. Nothing. He moved back to the corridor.
It was built to appear ancient. Flagstone archways with shady niches. Colored fiascoes on old wooden tables along the stone wall. Too many nooks and crannies to check out completely. Someone could easily have been watching him as he passed.
The heavy door at the end of the hall was decorated with an elaborate monogram B: the airtight door to a wine cellar.
There, Zach thought again.
He kept the gun moving as he stepped slowly toward the door. The smell of blood was so thick now, it overwhelmed that other smell, that living, waiting smell. But he had not forgotten it. His nerve ends felt that living presence, somewhere, somewhere close.
He reached the door. He pressed down the handle. There was a heavy suction sound as the seals around the edges came away from the frame. The lights within the room beyond flickered on automatically. The smell of death came rolling out like fog. It covered him.
The body was on the heavy oaken table in the center of the room. Its hands and bare feet were manacled to chains which were, in turn, secured to the table’s heavy legs. Oaken wine racks surrounded it, rack after rack, bookshelf wide, floor-to-ceiling tall.
It was a man’s body, red-haired, red-bearded, maybe forty, in jeans and a woolen shirt. Homeless, Zach guessed, from the lesions on his face and from his swollen feet and fungus-blackened toenails. His head was turned to the side. He was open-mouthed and staring as if in pained surprise. His torso was drenched in blood. The killing wound was a gash in the dead center of his chest. The blood had splashed down and stained the table on either side of him. He hadn’t been dead very long.
Zach came forward behind his gun. He could feel everything growing brighter, every detail becoming more sharp. His hyper-focus, Goulart called it; but this, he realized now, was more than that. This was hunter focus. Wolf focus. Every edge and splinter and thread around him glimmering with presence. His mind was working faster too, arranging sights and smells and deductions in various permutations, like sliding pieces of a puzzle picture into different slots to test where they fit.
He was thinking: No chairs around the table. Old stains down the table’s side. Old smells like these smells suffusing the wood of the walls and the racks. . . .
This wasn’t the first killing that had happened in this place. This was a murder room, a place set aside for the purpose. And more than that . . .
. . . the mixture of werewolf’s blood with holy water on the blade . . . transforming the blood of human sacrifice into a panacea, curing every disease, and retarding the aging process . . .
Zach’s eyes flicked over the wine racks—all the racks all around him.
“Oh Lord,” he whispered, because he already knew.
He stepped to the nearest rack. He reached for it with his left hand, still holding the gun with his right because something else was here, something alive and dangerous nearby. Still keeping an eye on the room and the dead man, he felt along the edges of the rack. Tried various ways of pulling it and pressing it. Then he heard a click and felt it give.
The rack swung outward. The bodies were hanging behind it. Three of them, each in a transparent plastic bag, each hooked to a metal rod like a suit of clothes. Inside each bag, a gaping mouth showed black, eyes stared obscurely, blood smeared the plastic, gore pooled around the corpse’s feet.
Eyeing the room, holding the gun, breathing hard now, Zach moved to the next rack. Pressed it. Three more bodies hung behind.
“Good Jesus.”
Four were behind the next rack. Zach kept moving around the room. Pressing the racks so that they swung out, revealing the bags, the bodies. The corpses dangled and stared through the plastic. They were men and women both. They were white and colored. Some looked to Zach like teenagers, most were middle-aged, some were old. No, not a serial killer, Zach thought. This was human sacrifice. The work of Dominic Abend—and of Stumpf’s baselard.
When he had done the full circuit of the room, all the racks were open; the dead surrounded him, hanging from every wall. All those mouths open as if gasping for air inside the plastic. All those wide eyes staring as if begging for release. All that flesh and
pooled viscera and smeared blood. An overwhelming array of slaughter.
Staggered by the sight, Zach slowly lowered his gun and gaped. He stood near the foot of the corpse on the center table. He checked the door that was still open on the empty corridor, then turned to the body beside it, then turned to the next body and the next, from one chamber of hanging corpses to the next and next, coming around in a complete circle until he faced the door again.
There was a living man standing in the doorway now. Zach recognized the stooped, monkish figure in his robe-like overcoat, his long greasy hair, his rat-like features: one of the gunmen who had fired on him in the Long Island City hallway. In a frantic flash, Zach thought of the Dezzy .50-cal that had nearly blown his head off. He saw the gun in the monk-man’s hand. He tried to bring his own weapon to bear. Too late.
The monk fired and hit Zach dead center. Zach sank to the floor and kept sinking into a pool of tarry blackness.
22
THE BEACH HOUSE
There was a fire on the southern horizon. Enormous cylinders of orange flame rolled and roared across the twilit sky. Cottages and barns were crumbling in on themselves, the wood splintering loudly, the sparks exploding upward. There were screams amidst the other noises—ragged women’s screams; the high screams of children—the screams dying as the people died.
Zach could see and hear it all from where he was, half a mile or so to the north. He continued trudging up the hillside, making his way toward the peak behind which the sun had set. A man stood waiting for him up there on the ridge, a man turning to shadow as the dusk deepened.