And now he noted a rectangle of brighter wallpaper next to the large armoire, and this large, light patch was shaped with the wardrobe’s rounded corners. So the heavy piece of furniture had been recently moved. He reached around the back of it, but his hand would not fit into the narrow crack of space between the wood and the wall. He rocked the armoire on its front legs, intending to slide it to one side, but it toppled to the hardwood floor. Riding over the sound of the crash, he thought he heard a car engine out in the yard. But the door behind the armoire had his full attention.
When he turned the knob, the door would not open. And now the old house suddenly became miles more interesting. This door was locked, while the downstairs door was open to any tramp who happened by. The wood panel was solid construction, and he was not about to break his foot trying to kick it in. He wrestled with the weight of the toppled armoire and moved it out of his way. Once he had space enough to maneuver, he put all his strength behind the twist of the knob to force the metal lock. It was an old mechanism, and it broke easily. The door opened onto a large bathroom with a second armoire pulled out from a window. A loop of knotted sheet dangled from the windowsill. One end was caught in the sash, and the other end was tied to a back leg of the wardrobe. And now he saw the remnants of a cot, its crumpled canvas and broken slats.
Somewhere beyond this room, he thought he heard the creak of wood. He stood very still. Then he heard it again. Something stirred on the floor below, or was it on the stairs? He stopped to listen for a few seconds more, but heard no further noise.
Well, old houses had old bones; their joints gave in to every breeze and creaked with the motion. And these centenarians were not airtight, but breathed in and out. He decided it was only the wind, nothing more.
He was reaching for his cell phone to call for the troopers when his eyes focused on something else. Sorrel knelt down beside the discarded cot canvas. He plucked up one long blond strand of baby-fine hair and held it up to the light—so delicate, so bright.
The strand of gold was the last thing he ever saw; the blow to the back of his head was that swift, that sure.
Minutes had passed since they heard the car engine pulling up to the house. Gwen carried the stack of journals, moving slowly, awkwardly.
“Help me, Sadie.” She deposited her load on the countertop and limped out of the white room and down the wide aisle of tables toward the trees. “We’ve got to put everything back the way it was. If he sees this mess—” And now she stopped, dismayed. Too many bits of the dummy’s head and torso lay within the dog-chain circle. An unholy mess was this body of an artificial man.
Where had Sadie gone?
Gwen got down on her knees and stretched out her body. Lying flat on her stomach, she batted the head with the broomstick. The dog held his Sitting Bull pose, but she knew better than to trust him. After she snagged the head, she stared at the rest of the torso beyond her reach, pondering how to recover it. “And all that stuffing.” Gwen could see the shredded bits of the plastic bags strewn everywhere.
“Not enough time to clean up,” said Sadie, appearing beside her. “And it doesn’t matter anymore. When The Fly comes through the door, we’ll put the dog on him.”
“No, the dog’s not ready.”
The dog was waiting on his biscuit. Sadie threw it to him. He leapt into the air and snatched it with amazing speed and sureness. Then he pranced to the limit of his chain, eager for another round of Geronimo and Sitting Bull.
“The dog’s ready. We have to do it now. You need a doctor.”
Gwen held the felt head in her hand, squeezing the material. “No, it’s too soon. We can’t do this.” She slowly sank down to the ground and sat cross-legged, staring at the ceiling until the brilliant light burned her eyes.
Sadie hunkered down beside her. “Why doesn’t he come down?” Now she was also looking at the ceiling. “What do you think he’s doing up there?”
“I don’t think he’s in the house.” She hugged herself with tight-wrapped arms.
“But the car hasn’t pulled out yet.”
How could she explain to Sadie that she could not feel the man anymore. He was somewhere else now, and she was sure of it. So there was more time to clean up the mess. “The dog needs another—”
“Look at me.” Sadie put her hands on Gwen’s shoulders. “You don’t want to do this. You’re the one who isn’t ready, and you never will be. You’re still waiting for someone to come and get us.”
“Okay, you’re right! And you know why? Because it isn’t going to work. This is not a movie. It’s real! He’s not The Fly, Sadie. He’s a real living man. You can’t kill him, you can’t even hurt him. All you can do is give us away.” She gripped her friend’s arm, pleading now. “He’ll be so mad, Sadie. We have to wait till—”
“We can’t wait any longer. Your leg is getting worse all the time.”
Gwen folded up, drawing in her knees, pressing both hands over her ears. She disowned her leg and its darkening flesh, its foul smell. She shut her eyes, until she felt Sadie’s hand on her hair, stroking her, calming her.
“Okay, we’ll put everything back the way it was.” Sadie stood up and walked over the invisible edge of the dog’s circle. She was holding the broom and keeping one eye on the dog. She stretched the broomstick out to the torso and began to nudge it back toward her.
The dog came at her, stealthy, head low to the ground. Surprised, Sadie could only stare, taking slow backward steps, not wanting to turn away from the animal.
“Don’t look directly at him.” Gwen tried to keep the panic from her voice as she crawled to the edge of the circle, making no sudden movements to set off the animal. “When you look at him, he takes that as a challenge. Stand sideways and look at me.”
Too late—there was a light in the animal’s eyes, a hint of something crafty from out of the woods, out of the wild. His muscles were bunching, tensing. And now he was almost in flight, running fast. Sadie thrust out the broom handle. The dog stopped short, taking the wood pole in his teeth and splintering it as he dragged it backward and Sadie with it. She dropped the handle and ran back to the edge of the circle, just ahead of the dog’s snapping teeth.
Sadie stood beyond the dog’s reach and watched him straining at his chain, wanting to get at her. She was shaking.
Gwen slowly got to her feet, crying and yelling at once. “You see? You don’t know what you’re doing!” And now the wounded leg failed her. She fell to the dirt and lay there, pounding the ground with one closed fist. “It won’t work! Can’t you see that? The dog won’t hold a pose.” She was screaming now. “He’ll rush the man before he gets a chance to prop the door open. Then when the man figures out what we did—”Her voice was lower, full of anger and frustration. “Then he’s going to hurt us really bad, Sadie. It’s stupid, just stupid to think this is going to work.”
Sadie looked as though she had just been slapped by her best friend. Her face was white. “I’m sorry.” The child’s voice was smaller now, almost a whisper, and her eyes were full of hurt. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Christmas Eve services were being held in the prison chapel, but Paul Marie was not in attendance. He stared out the window at the gray walls of an air shaft.
His most constant visitor had been inadvertently amusing tonight. At the end of their hour together, Father Domina had wished him a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year. The elderly priest had detected no irony in the prisoner’s sudden hilarity. The good old man had even taken great pleasure in Paul Marie’s tears as they rolled down the laughing man’s face.
Years ago, Jane Norris had also been a steady visitor. Their old love had become corrupted over time, but not entirely dispensed with, not on every level. He still had dreams about her body, but not her soul.
At his trial, she had seen it as her Christian duty to stand up in a public courtroom and tell every detail of their teenage couplings, the exact number of penetrations—not how many times th
ey had made love. In her sworn testimony, it had seemed very important to Jane that she had been his first—penetration.
For ten years, she had visited the prison, faithfully, religiously, using her allotted time to pray aloud for his soul, murdering it with each dryly uttered word of forgiveness for every act of love. Jane had never married, never taken another lover. She had become rather like an insane nun in her devotions to his salvation.
Five years ago, she had died by her own hand, and he sometimes wondered if it had been a sane act done in her only lucid moment of the decade. Perhaps toward the end of her life, unlike Father Domina, Jane had finally grasped irony—and then put her head in that oven.
Other people had replaced her in the visitors’ room, most of them policemen wanting to close old homicide cases with similar characteristics. And every two years, a different FBI agent would come by to chat for an hour and then go away with nothing for his trouble. The priest was far from lonely.
Even now he had a companion. The shadow under his bed was a constant presence, a reminder that his own mind was far from stable. This evening, he had given up the fight to call the thing by its true name—insanity. He accepted it now, and at the same time, he despised this debased entity, so smitten with him that it lay on the floor of his cell only to be near him.
The shadow had forgiven Mortimer Cray.
And the priest? He never would—never.
The shadow was apparently less sure of this, for hope emanated from the darkness under the bed.
The Christmas bells of three churches were tolling in the distance. Mortimer Cray stood in the greenhouse among his flowers, beholding a young fruit tree he had raised from a seedling. Its shape was almost feminine, thick leaves rounding out its form in an hourglass essence of the Lady Nature, the deity he loved best.
He looked away from the tree and turned inward to listen to the more insistent Old Testament God, a petulant Being prone to temper tantrums, Who was always shooting craps with the Devil and losing, then taking His losses out on the faithful. Poor Job had the bad luck to be created in the wrong half of the Bible.
Mortimer looked down on his shaking hands. He should have died years ago. Keeping him alive so long was the ultimate sadism. A gun lay in the top drawer of his bedside table. He visualized it in his hand and raised one finger to his temple, but failed with a sudden trembling, too much the coward to pull an imagined trigger.
Now a movement in the greenhouse glass had his full attention. Someone out in the yard was staring at him. It was a smooth young face so like Susan Kendall’s. Mortimer stepped backward and knocked a plant off the table. The pot shattered in a hundred pieces, but his attention was riveted on the young policeman beyond the transparent wall.
Rouge Kendall had been his youngest patient, the one he held responsible for the resurrection of his own long-dormant emotions. All through the long process of grief counseling, the child had unwittingly tortured his doctor by crying with Susan’s eyes, innocently opening up Mortimer’s soft underbelly, forcing him to empathize with a ten-year-old’s pain.
It seemed that young Rouge had lost his sister and then lost his sanity on the following day. The little boy had sat with his doctor, expressing fears over the selection of Susan’s small custom casket, for it left her no room to grow. Rather than point out the irrationality of this idea, Mortimer had interceded with the parents to give Susan an adult’s casket. At the time, he thought they would find the request absurd, but they had ordered it without protest to quell the anxiety of their living child.
At the service, he had been appalled by the effect of that tiny girl lost in the cavernous space of the white satin lining. His meddling had been a tragic mistake. He whispered a few words of apology to her corpse. And then, just for a blurred moment, her image had doubled, and he believed he had seen two children lying together. He had rubbed his eyes and told himself this was only stress. Or was it an insight into the dark mind and desires of the surviving twin? A hidden agenda for the larger casket? Suicidal ideation in a ten-year-old boy?
When faulty vision had corrected itself, and Susan was restored to her singular self, he had looked everywhere for her brother and found the child at the edge of the mourning crowd. Rouge was watching him with grave suspicion, as though, in the previous moment, he had been staring at Mortimer from the casket—from Susan’s point of view.
Muddled old fool. This was no child in the window glass, but a full-grown man. Rouge was reaching into his coat, exposing the gun in its holster.
Yes, let’s get this done and quickly.
But it was not a gun that the young policeman was holding up to the glass. It was a black-and-white portrait of two little girls with their arms entwined around one another. He secured the paper to the window with bits of tape.
Mortimer had seen these posters everywhere in town, yet now it took him forever to read the single word below the photograph: Please.
When he lifted his eyes from the page, Rouge Kendall was gone.
In the smoky light of Dame’s Tavern, Rouge put up one hand to hail the bartender, then pointed to his companion, Arnie Pyle, who needed another round of bourbon.
The FBI agent was still apologizing for his ignorance. “I swear, I had no idea your sister was a kidnap victim. I never saw any material on her case.”
“The State Police found the killer on their own, and pretty quick. There was no reason to call in the FBI.”
“Short-shot me again,” said the agent to the waiting bartender. “Really thin it out this time, okay? Watered-down bourbon is my version of abstinence.”
When Pyle’s drink arrived on the coaster in front of him, it was already paid for. The bartender pointed to a silver-haired man at the end of the bar. Julian Garret lifted his own glass in salute, drained it and walked away. The FBI man seemed relieved as he watched Garret’s progress toward the door. Then he swiveled his stool around to face Rouge. “So we have a deal? From now on we share?”
They clinked glasses to seal a bargain that Rouge had not actually agreed to.
“Good.” Pyle took a healthy swig from his glass. “I already know what you got from Caruthers. The old access road downshore from the boathouse? I hear the BCI techs pulled a few tire molds from the tracks.”
Rouge nodded. He was not inclined to elaborate.
“So you figure that’s where the perp stashed his car,” said Pyle. “Nice work. Now here’s the deal. You get me those molds, and the FBI lab will tell you where the perp shops for tires—and real fast. Our guys are the best.”
“No, you don’t want those molds.” Rouge smiled, aiming at coyness and succeeding, for the agent was already rearranging himself on the stool and cocking his mouth for an argument. Rouge put up one hand to stop him. “We only got fragments of tracks. Maybe ten or twelve different tire treads and some partial shoe prints.”
“We can do a lot with that, kid. The lab can tell you—”
“Arnie, I already know where most of them came from. That road leads to the foundations of a burnt-out house. It’s a hangout for teenagers. They drink beer, smoke a little weed.”
“Our guys could still make a pass for fibers and tread fragments. Might match what we got from the boathouse. Then when we catch the perp, we can place his car near the crime scene. Deal?”
Rouge shrugged, conveying boredom and reluctance with that single gesture—less work. “Okay, Arnie, I’ll get the molds for you.” And that neatly solved Captain Costello’s problem of how to get the feds to do tedious forensic work without demanding payback. “My turn.” Rouge ran one finger around his glass. He had not yet touched his first shot of whiskey, ordered twenty minutes ago. “You seem to know Julian Garret pretty well. Are you one of his sources?”
“Absolutely not, but we’ve done a lot of drinking together.” Pyle smiled over the rim of his glass. “Julie’s not gonna hear anything from me, if that’s what you’re worried about. No leaks.”
“No, that doesn’t worry me at all—since he�
�s a political columnist. He’s not here for the kidnappings. Are you?”
Arnie Pyle looked deep into his glass, as if his next strategy might be written on the ice cubes. Finally, he faced Rouge with a smile that might be genuine. “My compliments, kid. All right, Julie Garret thinks my only interest is Mrs. Hubble—developing her as a witness against Senator Berman. And I do think she could tie that little rat bastard to mob money. So Julie was almost right. But I had better leads to work in Washington. If not for Ali Cray, it wouldn’t have been worth the trip.”
“How did you know Ali was in Makers Village?”
“I always know where Ali is.” The agent worked on his bourbon and never seemed to notice that Rouge’s glass remained full.
“Did Ali ever tell you that you reminded her of someone?”
“No. Why do you ask? You know her from someplace?”
“She lived in Makers Village when she was a little girl. You didn’t know that?”
“I didn’t even know she had an uncle in this town,” said Pyle. “Not till Costello asked me to bring her to the hospital. All the early paperwork I could find on Ali Cray came from the Midwest. So you knew her when she was a kid?”
“We were both in the church choir when I was nine. The next year, I was shipped off to military school, and Ali’s family left town. That’s it. Now let’s hear your story.”
“My history with Ali?” Pyle drained his glass. “I met her when I was working a case in Boston. In those days, I was still hunting for missing kids full-time—and I was the best. But Ali knew more about pedophiles than the freaks knew about themselves. I tried to recruit her for the Bureau. She turned me down flat.”
The Judas Child Page 28
