Eyes to See

by Joseph Nassise

  I took a step back, my nerves jangling. “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

  “Who I am is unimportant. I want you to find your daughter, and I’m the only one who can give you the knowledge you need to do so.”

  “You know how to find my daughter?”

  Rather than responding verbally, the man reached inside his shirt and withdrew a parcel wrapped in a stained cloth and tied with what appeared to be twine. He offered it to me.

  Whatever it was, the sight of it made me instantly nauseous, as if my body instinctively knew something I did not. I stepped back a step without realizing I was doing so.

  “What’s this?” the stranger asked, surprised. “Don’t you want to save your little girl?”

  Despite my growing fear, I croaked out another response. “I don’t need your help.”

  The other laughed. “Of course you do, you just don’t know it yet.” He slipped the package back out of sight. “No matter. Everyone comes to me in their own time.”

  A grinning leer crept over his features, and the sight of it was enough to finally jar me out of my daze. I turned away without a word and continued across the park to my car. Once inside, chilled to the bone and wondering if I would ever be warm again, I turned the heater on high.

  My encounter in the park had used up valuable time, and I knew that now I could never make it across town before the APS meeting ended, so I turned the car toward home instead.

  It was completely dark by the time I arrived, so, once inside, I walked through the house turning on all the lights. Knowing what was out there, I’d grown uncomfortable with the darkness.

  My stomach was grumbling, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and so, once the lower floor was blazing like a shopping mall at Christmas time, I wandered into the kitchen to get something to eat.

  The parcel was sitting on my kitchen table.

  Same stained wrapping. Same dirty twine.

  The Preacher’s words came back to me like a whisper on the wind.

  “Everyone comes in their own time.”

  I edged past the table to the sink, stared out the window into the night, looking for God knows what. There was no way the old man could have beaten me home. I knew that. It was simply impossible. And yet …

  I turned back to the table.

  The package sat there, unmoving, daring me to unwrap it and see what was inside.

  Just how the hell had he …?

  An accomplice.

  He was working in conjunction with someone else! He must have called someone as I was leaving the park. Someone who knew where I lived, who could get inside the house to leave the parcel on the table.

  With that thought came the realization that I might not be alone in the house. I snatched the carving knife from the rack at my side and brandished it at the empty room in front of me.

  After a few moments of standing there and feeling stupid, my fear gave way to anger. This was my house and I’d be damned if I was going to be afraid in my own home!

  I set off to search the place and drive out anyone I found hiding there, never realizing the real threat was right there in front of me on the kitchen table.

  It took me a half hour to cover the entire house, but by the time I was finished I was certain that if there had been anyone there earlier, they were gone now. Satisfied that I was alone, I went back into the kitchen and sat down in front of the parcel, the knife close at hand, determined to get to the bottom of things. No sooner had I done so than the strange wave of nausea I’d experienced in the park returned, stronger this time. I gripped the edges of the table and swallowed hard, forcing a sudden surge of bile back down. I sat with my eyes closed, unmoving, until it passed.

  When it had, I opened my eyes and examined the package in front of me.

  The twine that held it together had been tied multiple times into a complex knot, and I could see right away it would take some doing to untie it. Rather than waste the time needed to do so, I picked up the knife and cut through it. The layers of cloth fell open, revealing another parcel inside the first. This one was smaller, about the size of a thick hardcover book, and was wrapped in newspaper pages held together with a thick dollop of red wax. Some kind of seal had been pressed into the wax. There may have been writing on it, but I wasn’t able to decipher it.

  The newspaper tore easily, revealing the treasure inside.

  A book.

  An old book, actually. Yellowed pages. The dry, musty smell of old parchment. A weathered cover of leatherlike material with more than its fair share of cracks. When I reached out to trace it with the tip of my finger, something strange happened.

  The book shifted beneath my touch, as if trying to escape.

  I yanked my hand back in surprise.

  I stared at the book in a kind of sick fascination, the way one stared at a bad traffic accident, disgust and horror mingling with a deep-seated need to see, to understand, to know just how bad it was.

  Tentatively, I reach out again.

  This time the cover yielded slightly to my touch but didn’t pull away. Maybe I’d just imagined it. Something still didn’t feel right, though. The book was warm, pliable, like a living thing rather than an inanimate object.

  I half expected to hear it breathing.

  Horrified, yet still strangely enthralled, I gently pushed the cover open.

  28

  NOW

  The events at Clearwater’s had left me full of conflicting feelings. My thoughts were a jumbled mess, and as a result the rest of the afternoon passed slowly with little to show for it. The idea that Elizabeth had been, and might still be, in the presence of something powerful enough not only to sense the link Clearwater had crafted with her magick but to use that portal for its own dark ends was terrifying because there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I didn’t have the power or ability to create a link like that on my own, which meant I was going to have to rely on others for help. I was perceptive enough to know that doing that wasn’t one of my strong suits; it never had been, and, in the years since Anne had left, what little social skill I’d possessed had gone south mighty quick.

  All in all, I was starting to think I’d been better off not knowing anything.

  The phone rang, startling in the stillness of the house. I grabbed it before the harsh ringing could make the pounding in my head worse than it already was.

  “Hunt,” I said gruffly, leaning against the nearby wall.

  “It’s me,” Dmitri said.

  At the sound of his voice I stood up straighter. He wouldn’t be calling unless he’d found something. I felt my adrenaline start to flow.

  “What have you got?”

  His refusal to answer the question directly spoke volumes. “Can you come down here?”

  I didn’t need to ask where “here” was. There was only one place I’d ever seen Dmitri and that was at Murphy’s.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “On my way.”

  I took a quick shower and changed my clothes, then grabbed some spare money out of my dresser. As an afterthought, I stuffed the photographs from the crime scene into an old satchel and took them with me; maybe Dmitri would be able to make heads or tails out of them when I couldn’t.

  When Dmitri let me in twenty minutes later, Denise Clearwater was already there, waiting.

  The memory of the attraction I’d felt for her earlier was hovering in the forefront of my mind, so it was all I could do to mumble a hello. My face felt like it was burning with embarrassment and with it came the realization that somewhere along the way I had stopped referring to her in my mind as Clearwater and had moved on to Denise. That was enough to make me be sure to sit with a few bar stools between us so there wasn’t any chance of us accidentally touching and forging another link.

  I knew that she and Dmitri must have shared stories already, otherwise she wouldn’t be here, and I wondered just how much she had told him.

  With my luck, probab
ly everything.

  Yet Dmitri didn’t seem upset. At least not with me. Given how he’d specifically told me to behave before sending me to see her, that made me think that maybe she hadn’t told him everything. Which then made me question why, which only made my already pounding head hurt even more as I tried to work the angles.

  I think I was happier being a recluse.

  Dmitri might not have been upset, but he did appear more subdued than usual, as if something heavy was weighing on his mind.

  There were a few minutes of small talk as Dmitri passed out cups of coffee, and then he got right down to business.

  “Your detective friend is lying to you.”

  I shrugged. “I know. Question is, how much?”

  “It’s bad, Hunt. He’s playing you, angling for a promotion or something equally stupid.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  There was a long moment of silence, long enough that I wondered if he and Denise were mouthing words to each other over my head. Dmitri spoke up once more.

  “Let’s go down to my office. I’ve got a few things to show you.”

  A door behind the bar opened onto a staircase leading down into the basement where all the bar’s essential supplies, including its liquor, were stored.

  “Watch your step; the stairs are getting a bit old,” Dmitri said as he started down. “There’s a railing on the right, Hunt. It should support your weight if you don’t lean on it too much.”

  Great.

  I hesitated at the top, not liking the creaking sounds rising up from the staircase as it worked to support Dmitri’s weight.

  “Let me help you, Hunt,” Denise said from behind me, and I felt her grasp my arm just above the elbow, as if she intended to help me negotiate the first step.

  This time the link was almost instantaneous. Sight flooded in like the tide, revealing the staircase ahead of me, a sagging old structure that was everything I had expected it to be: weary with age and worn smooth by the passage of many feet. Just as Dmitri had said, a makeshift railing was tacked onto the right-hand side, though it looked less able to support my weight than the steps themselves. About halfway down the staircase a bare lightbulb hung down from a wire. As my eyes adjusted to the sight, I could see Dmitri’s broad back disappear into the depths of the room below.

  Memories of what had happened earlier that afternoon slammed to the forefront of my mind. I turned my head and hissed in Denise’s direction. “Let go!”

  “No,” she replied, and the steel I’d heard in her voice earlier was back. “Dmitri said you need to see this and that’s exactly what he meant. You need to see it. Now shut up and get moving. I’ve been here before; I won’t fall.”

  Dmitri’s voice wafted back up the stairs to us, apparently having heard the exchange. “She’s right, Hunt. Stop being so damned independent and let her help.”

  She’d shared everything all right.

  “What if …”

  Denise was already shaking her head. “It won’t happen again, Hunt. Frankly, if I’d given it an ounce of thought before forging the link, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Don’t worry; this time there won’t be any bleed through.”

  I took her at her word; what else could I do?

  The storage room spread out before us at the bottom of the staircase. Large steel shelves had been erected throughout the space, containing everything from paper products to what seemed like endless rows of liquor and cases of beer. Dmitri led us through the man-made maze until we reached the other side, where we were greeted by the sight of a dead-bolted and padlocked door. Our host removed a thick set of keys from his belt and unlocked it.

  “Welcome to my inner sanctum,” he said with a grin and pushed the door open.

  The room was small, but well lit, the bright, overhead fluorescents a vast change from the gloom of the storage room through which we’d just passed. It was climate controlled as well; I could hear the hum of the air conditioning over the soft whir of the computer equipment that lined the walls. Much of it I didn’t recognize, though all of it looked to be top-of-the-line stuff. It was clear that Dmitri hadn’t skimped when it came to outfitting his operation, a view that was only reinforced when you caught sight of the modular workstation on the far side of the room that contained not one, not two, but half a dozen linked flat-screen monitors that were currently running some kind of search. Photographs and background information on a wide variety of individuals were flashing past at an amazing rate, and when the computer found something that apparently matched the search criteria, it shunted that record to a separate, stand-alone screen which already contained quite a few individual dossiers.

  Dmitri crossed the room and took a seat in the leather chair in front of this high-tech command center. Sliding a keyboard in front of him, he went to work, his fingers flying across the keys as he spoke.

  “You asked me to see what the police were hiding. Aside from the photographs of the aliens at Area 51 and the truth about who actually killed Jimmy Hoffa,” a flash of teeth as he grinned at us over his own joke, “it seems that the good boys in blue have been, how shall I say it, lying through their teeth?”

  I grabbed the two extra chairs that were waiting nearby, and both Denise and I settled in beside him as he punched at the keys some more.

  “You told me Stanton had summoned you to witness two murder scenes, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “One on Beacon Hill and one in Back Bay.” The way he’d emphasized the two made me ask, “Are there others?”

  He nodded. “Oh, I’d say so.”

  Another few seconds of additional keyboard work and then the right-most monitor responded by beginning to display a series of photographs in evenly spaced rows.

  “Forty-seven others, in fact, going back almost two decades. Funny how your faithful police detective failed to mention them.”

  I could only stare along in dumbfounded shock as image after image appeared on the monitors in front of us. Most of the victims were male, but there were more than a handful of females as well. The victims ranged in age from teenagers to the elderly, with the youngest being seventeen and the oldest eighty-seven. The locations were scattered all across the US, with two in Mexico and one in Canada.

  “Tell him what you told me,” Denise said.

  Dmitri shrugged, as if to say why not. “An interagency task force was set up six months ago, apparently after some rising star at Quantico managed to draw a link between some of the victims. The man in question, Special Agent Robertson, also got himself placed in charge of the newly formed task force. First thing he did was have the techies create a database to keep track of the growing number of cases that fit the profile of their killer. All I did was tap into that database.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, as if breaking into a highly secure federal law enforcement database without being detected was something any child over the age of five could do.

  Dmitri had already printed out the individual dossiers and now handed them over to me. By the way he did it I knew that he and Denise had already been through the same files, so I didn’t waste time digging through them myself.

  Instead, I said, “Tell me.”

  Dmitri turned back to his computer and pulled up a new image. This one was a map of the US with the locations and dates of the killings plotted on top of it.

  “By plotting the killings chronologically, we can start to get a sense of just what this guy has been up to,” Dmitri said. “Near as I can tell, the killings stretch back fifteen years. They started sporadically, separated by thousands of miles and several months. Then, about five years ago, they began to occur at a faster pace and appeared to be grouped in a more efficient manner, without the crisscrossing of the country that had been a hallmark of the murders prior to that point.”

  Denise spoke up from beside me. “Then, in the last several months, the killer focused all of his efforts in New England.”

  Dmitri punched a few keys and the marked killings
appeared on the map as a giant spiral, circling in toward the Greater Boston area where the latest two murders had occurred, those of Brenda Connolly and James Marshall.

  “Holy shit,” I said, almost to myself, as I realized the depth and scope of what had been happening for the last fifteen years. How the hell had Stanton kept this from me? And more importantly, what did this have to do with Elizabeth?

  My thoughts whirled at a frantic pace. At first glance one might think that Elizabeth was just another of the killer’s victims, albeit an unrecognized one, but I refused to believe that. For one, all but two of the other victims were adults, and in both of those cases the victims were young boys in their early teens. Serial killers are typically creatures of habit, using the same techniques, attacking similar individuals, often remaining in the same geographical area. There wasn’t a single other case where a child as young as Elizabeth was the target, which was a good sign. For another, all of the bodies of the killer’s victims had been left where they eventually would be found. None of them had been hidden away. None had been left for more than a week before being found. Discovery, and the impact it had, seemed to be part of the killer’s modus operandi. He wouldn’t have changed that for a single victim and then gone right back to what he’d been doing before.

  No, whatever the killer’s tie was to Elizabeth, it wasn’t because she was simply another one of his victims.

  I gave it some thought and realized that something about their explanation was bothering me.

  “You said it took them a while to connect the killings. Why is that?”

  Another shrug. “The data is stored on different computer networks depending on the agency involved. The FBI doesn’t share its data with the state police, the staties don’t share with the locals, and so on. With so many of the killings happening in different parts of the country and with considerable time between them, no one put it all together.