"And that wasn't the only cut." He sounded like he was talking to himself. "There was another one. But down here. After Frank Peterson was murdered."
Here was another missing piece.
"Tell me, Detective. Tell me tell me tell me!"
"I think . . . not over the phone. Can you fly down here? We should sit down and talk. You, me, Alec Pelley, Howie Gold, and a State Police detective who's also been working the case. And maybe Marcy. Her, too."
"I think that's a good idea, but I'll have to discuss it with my client, Mr. Pelley."
"Talk to Howie Gold instead. I'll give you his number."
"Protocol--"
"Howie employs Alec, so protocol isn't an issue."
Holly mulled this over. "Can you get in touch with the Dayton Police Department, and the Montgomery County district attorney? I can't find out all I want to know about the murders of the Howard girls and about Heath Holmes--that's the orderly's name--but I think you could."
"Is this guy's trial still pending? If it is, they probably won't want to give out a whole lot of infor--"
"Mr. Holmes is dead." She paused. "Just like Terry Maitland."
"Jesus," he muttered. "How weird can this get?"
"Weirder," she said. Another thing of which she had no doubt.
"Weirder," he repeated. "Maggots in the cantaloupe."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Nothing. Call Mr. Gold, okay?"
"I still think I had better call Mr. Pelley first. Just to be sure."
"If you really think so. And Ms. Gibney . . . I guess maybe you do know your business."
That made her smile.
11
Holly got the green light from Mr. Pelley and called Howie Gold at once, now pacing a worry-track on the cheap hotel carpet and obsessively punching at her Fitbit to read her pulse. Yes, Mr. Gold thought it would be a good idea if she flew down, and no, she didn't need to fly coach. "Book business class," he said. "More legroom."
"All right." She felt giddy. "I will."
"You really don't believe Terry killed the Peterson boy?"
"No more than I think Heath Holmes killed those two girls," she said. "I think it was someone else. I think it was an outsider."
VISITS
July 25th
1
Detective Jack Hoskins of the Flint City PD woke up at two AM on that Wednesday morning in triple misery: he had a hangover, he had a sunburn, and he needed to take a shit. It's what I get for eating at Los Tres Molinos, he thought . . . but had he eaten there? He was pretty sure he had--enchiladas stuffed with pork and that spicy cheese--but wasn't positive. It might have been Hacienda. Last night was hazy.
Have to cut back on the vodka. Vacation is over.
Yes, and over early. Because their shitty little department currently had just one working detective. Sometimes life was a bitch. Often, even.
He got out of bed, wincing at the single hard thud in his head when his feet hit the floor and rubbing at the burn on the back of his neck. He shucked his shorts, grabbed the newspaper off the nightstand, and plodded to the bathroom to take care of his business. Ensconced on the toilet, waiting for the semi-liquid gush that always came six hours or so after he ate Mexican food (would he never learn?), he opened the Call and rattled his way to the comics, the only part of the local paper that was worth a damn.
He was squinting at the tiny dialogue balloons in Get Fuzzy when he heard the shower curtain rattle. He looked up and saw a shadow behind the printed daisies. His heart leaped into his throat, walloping. Someone was standing in his tub. An intruder, and not just some stoned junkie thief who'd wriggled through the bathroom window and taken refuge in the only place available when he saw the bedroom light come on. No. This was the same someone who had been standing behind him at that fucking abandoned barn out in Canning Township. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. That encounter (if it had been an encounter) refused to leave his mind, and it was almost as if he had been expecting this . . . return.
You know that's bullshit. You thought you saw a man in the barn, but when you put the light on the guy, he turned out to be nothing but a piece of busted farm equipment. Now you think there's a man in your tub, but what looks like his head is just the shower head and what looks like his arm is nothing but your long-handled back-scrubber stuck through the grab handle on the wall. The rattling sound you heard was either a draft or just in your head.
He closed his eyes. Opened them again and stared at the shower curtain with its stupid plastic flowers, the kind of shower curtain only an ex-wife could love. Now that he was fully awake, reality reasserted itself. Just the shower head, just the grab handle with the back-scrubber stuck through it. He was an idiot. A hungover idiot, the worst kind. He--
The shower curtain rattled again. It rattled because what he had wanted to believe was his back-scrubber now grew shadowy fingers and reached out to touch the plastic. The shower head turned and seemed to stare at him through the translucent curtain. The newspaper fell from Hoskins's relaxing fingers and landed on the tiles with a soft flap. His head was thudding and thudding. The back of his neck was burning and burning. His bowels relaxed, and the small bathroom was filled with the smell of what Jack was suddenly sure had been his last meal. The hand was reaching for the edge of the curtain. In a second--two, at the most--it would be pulled back and he would be looking at something so horrible it would make his worst nightmare seem like a sweet daydream.
"No," he whispered. "No." He tried to get up from the toilet, but his legs wouldn't support him and his considerable bottom thumped back onto the ring. "Please, no. Don't."
A hand crept around the edge of the curtain, but instead of pulling it back, the fingers only folded around it. Tattooed on those fingers was a word: CANT.
"Jack."
He couldn't reply. He sat naked on the toilet with the last of his shit still dripping and plopping into the bowl, his heart a runaway engine in his chest. He felt that soon it would rip right out of him, and his last sight on earth would be of it lying on the tiles, splattering blood on his ankles and the comics section of the Flint City Call with its final twitching beats.
"That's not a sunburn, Jack."
He wanted to faint. To just collapse off the toilet, and if he gave himself a concussion on the tile floor, even fractured his skull, so what? At least he would be out of this. But consciousness stubbornly remained. The shadowy figure in the tub remained. The fingers on the curtain remained: CANT, in fading blue letters.
"Touch the back of your neck, Jack. If you don't want me to pull back this curtain and show myself, do it now."
Hoskins raised a hand and pressed it to the nape of his neck. His body's reaction was immediate: terrifying bolts of pain which ran up to his temples and down to his shoulders. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared with blood.
"You've got cancer," the figure behind the curtain informed him. "It's in your lymph glands, and your throat, and your sinuses. It's in your eyes, Jack. It's eating into your eyes. Soon you'll be able to see it, little gray knobs of malignant cancer cells swimming around in your vision. Do you know when you got it?"
Of course he knew. When this creature had touched him out there in Canning Township. When it had caressed him.
"I gave it to you, but I can take it back. Would you like me to take it back?"
"Yes," Jack whispered. He began to cry. "Take it back. Please take it back."
"Will you do something if I ask you?"
"Yes."
"You won't hesitate?"
"No!"
"I believe you. And you won't give me any reason not to believe you, will you?"
"No! No!"
"Good. Now clean yourself up. You stink."
The CANT hand withdrew, but the shape behind the shower curtain was still staring at him. Not a man, after all. Something far worse than the worst man who had ever lived. Hoskins reached for the toilet paper, aware as he did so that he was tilting sideways off the seat and th
at the world was simultaneously dimming and dwindling. And that was good. He fell, but there was no pain. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.
2
Jeannie Anderson woke at four that morning, with her usual wee-hours full bladder. Ordinarily she would have used their bathroom, but Ralph had been sleeping badly ever since Terry Maitland had been shot, and tonight he had been particularly restless. She got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom at the end of the hall, the one past the door to Derek's room. She considered flushing after relieving herself and decided even that might wake him. It could wait until morning.
Two more hours, Lord, she thought as she left the bathroom. Two more hours of good sleep, that's all I w--
She stopped halfway down the hall. The downstairs had been dark when she left the bedroom, hadn't it? She had been more asleep than awake, but surely she would have noticed a light on.
Are you sure of that?
No, not completely, but there certainly was a light on down there now. White light. Muted. The one over the stove.
She went to the stairs and stood at the top, looking down at that light, brow wrinkled, thinking profoundly. Had the burglar alarm been set before they went to bed? Yes. Arming it before bed was a house rule. She set it, and Ralph had double-checked it before they went up. One or the other of them always set the alarm, but the double-checks, like Ralph's poor sleeping, had only begun since the death of Terry Maitland.
She considered waking Ralph and decided against it. He needed his sleep. She considered going back to get his service revolver, in the box on the high shelf in the closet, but the closet door squeaked and that would surely wake him. And wasn't that pretty paranoid? The light probably had been on when she went to the bathroom and she just hadn't noticed. Or maybe it had gone on by itself, a malfunction. She descended the steps quietly, moving to the left on the third step and to the right on the ninth to avoid the creaks, not even thinking about it.
She walked to the kitchen door and peeked around the frame, feeling both stupid and not stupid at all. She sighed, blowing back her bangs. The kitchen was empty. She started across the room to turn off the stove light, then stopped. There were supposed to be four chairs at the kitchen table, three for the family and the one they called the guest chair. But now there were only three.
"Don't move," someone said. "If you move, I'll kill you. If you scream, I'll kill you."
She stopped, pulse hammering, the hair on the back of her neck lifting. If she hadn't done her business before coming down, urine would be running down her legs and puddling on the floor. The man, the intruder, was sitting on the guest chair in their living room, just far enough back from the archway that she could only see him from the knees down. He was wearing faded jeans and moccasins with no socks. His ankles were riddled with red blotches that might have been psoriasis. His upper body was just a vague silhouette. All she could tell was that his shoulders were broad and a little slumped--not as if he was tired, but as if they were so crammed with workout muscle that he couldn't square them. It was funny, all you could see at a moment like this. Terror had frozen her brain's usual sorting ability, and everything flowed in without prejudice. This was the man who had killed Frank Peterson. The man who bit into him like a wild animal and raped him with a tree branch. That man was in her house, and here she stood in her shortie pajamas, with her nipples no doubt sticking out like headlights.
"Listen to me," he said. "Are you listening?"
"Yes," Jeannie whispered, but she had begun to sway, on the edge of a faint, and she was afraid she might pass out before he could say what he had come to say. If that happened, he would kill her. After that he might leave, or he might go upstairs to kill Ralph. He'd do it before Ralph's mind cleared enough to know what was going on.
And leave Derek to come home from camp an orphan.
No. No. No.
"W-What do you want?"
"Tell your husband it's done here in Flint City. Tell him he has to stop. Tell him that if he does that, things go back to normal. Tell him if he doesn't, I'll kill him. I'll kill them all."
His hand emerged from the shadows of the living room and into the dim light cast by the single-bar fluorescent. It was a big hand. He closed it into a fist.
"What does it say on my fingers? Read it to me."
She stared at the faded blue letters. She tried to speak and couldn't. Her tongue was nothing but a lump clinging to the roof of her mouth.
He leaned forward. She saw eyes under a broad shelf of forehead. Black hair, short enough to bristle. Black eyes, not just on her but in her, searching her heart and mind.
"It says MUST," he told her. "You see that, don't you?"
"Y-Y-Y--"
"And what you must do is tell him to stop." Red lips moving inside a black goatee. "Tell him if he or any of them tries to find me, I'll kill them and leave their guts in the desert for the buzzards. Do you understand me?"
Yes, she tried to tell him, but her tongue wouldn't move and her knees were unlocking and she put her arms out to break her fall and she didn't know if she succeeded in that or not because she was gone into darkness before she hit the floor.
3
Jack woke up at seven o'clock with bright summer sun shining through the window and across his bed. Birds were twittering outside. He sat bolt upright, staring wildly around, only faintly aware that his head was throbbing from last night's vodka.
He got out of bed fast, opened the drawer of his bedside table, and took out the .38 Pathfinder he kept there for home protection. He high-stepped across the bedroom with the gun held beside his right cheek and the short barrel pointing at the ceiling. He kicked his boxers aside, and when he got to the door, which stood open, he paused next to it with his back to the wall. The smell wafting out was fading but familiar: the aftermath of last night's enchilada adventures. He had gotten up to offload; that much, at least, hadn't been a dream.
"Is anybody in there? If so, answer up. I'm armed and I will shoot."
Nothing. Jack took a deep breath and pivoted around the doorframe, going low, sweeping the room from side to side with the barrel of the .38. He saw the toilet with the lid up and the ring down. He saw the newspaper on the floor, turned to the comics. He saw the tub, with its translucent flowered curtain pulled across. He saw shapes behind it, but those were the shower head, the grab handle, the back-scrubber.
Are you sure?
Before he could lose his nerve, he took a step forward, slid on the bathmat, and grabbed the shower curtain to keep from going ass over teapot. It pulled loose from the rings and covered his face. He screamed, clawed it aside, and pointed the .38 into the tub at nothing. No one there. No boogeyman. He peered at the bottom of the tub. He wasn't exactly conscientious about keeping it clean, and if someone had been standing in there, he would have left footprints. But the dried scum of soap and shampoo was unmarked by tracks. It had all been a dream. A particularly vivid nightmare.
Still, he checked the bathroom window and all three doors leading outside. Everything was buttoned up.
Okay, then. Time to relax. Or almost. He went back to the bathroom for one more look, this time checking the towel cabinet (nothing) and toeing at the fallen shower curtain with disgust. Time to replace that sucker. He'd swing by Home Depot today.
He reached absently to rub the back of his neck, and hissed with pain as soon as his fingers made contact. He went to the sink and turned around, but trying to see the back of your neck by looking over your shoulder was worse than useless. He opened the top drawer under the sink and found nothing but shaving stuff, combs, an unraveling Ace bandage, and the world's oldest tube of Monistat: another little souvenir from the Age of Greta. Like the stupid shower curtain.
In the bottom drawer he found what he was looking for, a mirror with a broken handle. He rubbed the dust from its reflective surface, backed up until his butt was touching the lip of the sink, and held up the mirror. The back of his neck was flaming red, and he could see little seed-pea
rl blisters forming. How was that possible, when he slathered himself with sunblock as a matter of course, and didn't have a sunburn anywhere else?
That's not a sunburn, Jack.
Hoskins made a little whimpering sound. Surely no one had been in his tub early this morning, no creepy weirdo with CANT tattooed on his fingers--surely not--but one thing was certain: skin cancer ran in his family. His mother and one of his uncles had died of it. It goes with the red hair, his father had said, after he himself had had skin tags removed from his driver's side arm, pre-cancerous moles from his calves, and a basal cell carcinoma from the back of his neck.
Jack remembered a huge black mole (growing, always growing) on his uncle Jim's cheek; he remembered the raw sores on his mother's breastbone and eating into her left arm. Your skin was the largest organ in your body, and when it went haywire, the results were not pretty.
Would you like me to take it back? the man behind the curtain had asked.
"That was a dream," Hoskins said. "I got a scare out in Canning, and last night I ate a shitload of bad Mexican food, so I had a nightmare. That's all, end of story."
That didn't stop him from feeling for lumps in his armpits, under the angles of his jaw, inside his nose. Nothing. Only a little too much sun on the back of his neck. Except he had no sunburn anywhere else. Just that single throbbing stripe. It wasn't actually bleeding--which sort of proved his early morning encounter had only been a bad dream--but it was already growing that crop of blisters. He should probably see a doctor about it, and he would . . . after he gave it a few days to get better on its own, that was.
Will you do something if I ask you? You won't hesitate?
No one would, Jack thought, looking at the back of his neck in the mirror. If the alternative was getting eaten from the outside in--eaten alive--no one would.
4
Jeannie woke up staring at the bedroom ceiling, at first not able to understand why her mouth was filled with the coppery taste of panic, as if she had narrowly avoided a bad fall, or why her hands were raised, palms splayed out in a warding-off gesture. Then she saw the empty half of the bed on her left, heard the sound of Ralph splashing in the shower, and thought, It was a dream. The most vivid damn nightmare of all time for sure, but that's all it was.