She also said that someone had recently stolen Astrid, Isabella’s big doll, from the back porch. Anita said Bella’s tantrum-eased somewhat by back-to-back viewings of The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, and a small bag of Famous Amos-wasn’t fully over yet.
Mary had hung up the phone and found that her difficulty breathing had begun to ebb. Slightly.
She knew the police couldn’t help her this night, not if Jean Luc could so easily get to her. How could she take the chance? If she could just speak to Celeste. To Jesse Ray. If she could just have someone to talk to.
She had texted Jesse Ray a dozen times in the past twenty minutes.
At ten-thirty the phone rings. She whips the phone from the cradle.
“Celeste?”
A lot of static. Through it, she hears: “No. This is Jesse Ray.”
It is the first time she has ever spoken to him. His voice seems deep, a baritone. But it is too scratchy to tell anything else. A cell call from the fringe of its range.
She begins to talk. She tells him everything, the words tumbling out-how she helped set up Paris, how Jean Luc had threatened her this night, how Jean Luc had threatened Isabella. When she finishes her tale, Jesse is silent for a few moments. If not for the static, she might think he had hung up.
Then, as casually as someone might agree to help you move furniture, Jesse Ray saves her life. “I’ll take care of this for you,” he says. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”
Her heart soars. Maybe there is a way out of all this.
She wears black jeans, hikers, a thick sweatshirt. Her parka is on the couch, as is her shoulder bag. For the hundredth time in the past ten minutes, beginning the moment she’d hung up the phone, she steps over to the front window, looks out.
And, suddenly, in the carbon blue light of the Dairy Barn sign, he is there. Jesse Ray’s dark sedan is parked across the street, its exhaust pipe spewing big, gray reassuring fumes, his left arm sticking out of the window, gold watch gleaming, his hand holding the ever-present cigarette, just like always.
Then, the passenger door opens and Celeste, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and huge fur coat, exits the car, crosses the street, toward the apartment building.
The phone rings.
“Hello?”
Static. Interference from the neon across the street. “Celeste is in the lobby. Buzz her in.”
She vaults across the room, hits the button, hoping the new locks work with her old buzzer. “Okay?”
“Yeah. She’s in,” Jesse Ray says. “Listen, she’s got a gun with her. Let her in, lock the door behind her, and wait for me.”
She moves back over to the window. “All right.”
“And keep the damn lights down. I can see you up there.”
“Okay. I’ll turn them off.”
“Do you know how to use an automatic?” Jesse Ray asks.
“No.”
“Have you ever fired a gun before?”
“No.”
Pause. “Well, Celeste has.”
Before she can respond there comes a knock at the door.
Mary puts down the phone, runs across the living room, her heart hammering in her chest, hardly believing that Celeste will be on the other side, hardly believing that her friends, her only friends, have come to help her, hardly believing that this nightmare is about to come to an end.
She opens the door. It is not Celeste.
It is Jean Luc. In his right hand is Celeste’s hat, along with a bloody silver earring, shaped like an icicle. In his left hand, a gun.
Jean Luc points the gun at Mary’s forehead, eases back the hammer, and says: “You shouldn’t have called them.”
65
Carla Davis rushes across the icy parking lot at the Cleveland Heights city hall. Bobby Dietricht has gone to Jeremiah Cross’s address on Powell Road. Greg is on his way to the Cain Manor apartments. It is Carla’s job to reach out to the Cleveland Heights PD before they begin banging on doors. Even though time is incredibly tight, it is absolutely necessary.
In the lobby of the Cleveland Heights city hall Carla sees two grimfaced men chatting by the elevators; one weaselly and rail thin; the other portly, pockmarked. Carla recognizes the older, heavier of the men as Denny Sanchez, a Cleveland Heights detective.
She takes out her badge, and all three cops exhibit the usual camaraderie, tempered by the usual rivalry.
“What can we do for the city?” Sanchez asks.
Carla explains, in minimal detail, the need for Cleveland Heights assistance.
Sanchez buys half the loaf, says: “I think the chief will want a little bit more.”
Carla glances at her watch. A little bit more puts Paris in the middle. “That’s classified for the time being.”
“Then so are the Cain Manor apartments,” Sanchez says. “Just give me a name. I won’t take it.”
Carla hesitates for a moment. “Cross.”
The skinny cop barks a laugh.
“Something funny?” Carla says, leaning in, towering over him.
“No,” he says. “No ma’am.”
Sanchez asks: “Is there somewhere we can call you?”
Carla holds the skinny cop’s stare until he looks away, then says, “I can wait right here if you’ve got to talk to someone, Denny.”
“Well, we have to clear this from high on high. You understand. It’s New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake. Let me talk to Chief Blake. I’ll call you right back.”
“Like tonight?”
“Like in ten minutes,” Sanchez says.
Carla flips him a card, holds up her phone. “Ten minutes.”
66
An unknown room. Beyond dark. Black walls, ceiling, floor. A large round object in front of him, like a kettle or an old gas grill. He is surrounded by candles, but the light is instantly devoured by the gloom, immediately digested into the air, thick with death. Thumping music comes from somewhere.
He had traveled, definitely. He had been in a car. He looks at the object on his lap.
It is a gun. His gun.
The smell is coming from the huge bowl in front of him. He leans forward and, as he does, in the scant light, he sees the putrefacted flesh, the blackened organs, the shimmer of a thousand maggots, fat with marrow. He bolts to the corner of the room and, like the inevitability of vomit itself, gives in to the nausea and retches on the floor, near the corner. His vision vibrates with colors around the edges.
He wipes his mouth, tries to steady himself, a deep paranoia rummaging inside him. He hallucinates wildly, thoughts and sounds and emotions whirling. He finds the chair, pulls it back to the wall, sits heavily.
One minute of black silence passes, then:
“Son?”
Paris raises his head. He sees a chair on the other side of the big kettle. A figure is sitting on it. Sitting? No. More like floating just an inch or so off the surface, a weightless, matterless being.
It is Frank Paris.
“Dad?”
The figure on the chair shimmers, disappears, returns, like a pixilated image coming and going from clear focus. His father is robust and healthy again. His hands look huge and nicked and dad-grimy.
For some reason, the sight of his father, dead these many years, does not scare him. What scares him is his father’s scrutiny. After all this time his father can now assess him as a full-grown man, instantly, as he might a too-young doctor holding onto a clipboard that would chronicle the end of his life.
Jack Paris wonders: Am I tall enough? Am I smart enough? Am I man enough?
Am I father enough?
Frank Paris will say no to that one. No, son, you are not father enough. You couldn’t make your marriage work, and you will never be father enough to my granddaughter.
Shimmer.
His father is suddenly thinner, young-old again, his face is drawn downward in a sallow avalanche of skin. In his hands, a battered Etch-A-Sketch.
Happy Birthday, Daddy!
“Do a trick for me,
Jackie,” his father says.
“What, Dad?”
Silence.
You’ve got to know what breaks his heart.
“Dad?”
Again, silence. The definition of empty.
His father is gone.
Then, suddenly, all the lights of hell explode in Jack Paris’s eyes.
67
At first, to the 617 people tuned to Cable99 on New Year’s Eve, it looks to be a scaled-down version of Hollywood Squares. Or The Brady Bunch. Four windows dividing the TV screen into four equal sections.
Closer examination, to those in the know, would yield the understanding that these are four separate webcam feeds, the sort of cybercast videos that jump and lurch and produce, overall, a rather vertiginous effect in the viewer.
Still, anything can happen on Cable99, and often did.
In the upper-left-hand frame is a disheveled man, early forties, maybe. He is sitting in a chair, staring blankly at the camera. But not moving. The room he is in looks to have very dark walls, and the bright lights cast harsh shadows across his face.
In the upper-right-hand corner is a still photo of a very exotic-looking young woman, a fashion model head shot, a real dark-eyed beauty. The lower two squares are blank.
In the control booth at Cable99, Furnell Braxton, the unlucky low man on the totem pole who drew New Year’s Eve tech duty, casts a disinterested eye toward the monitor as he eats his Tony Roma’s.
At eleven-thirty-one, a DVD begins to play in the lower-right-hand frame. It looks like a video of a man standing in front of the Justice Center, a place Furnell Braxton tries to avoid at all costs. The video is pretty jerky, as always, but Furnell is not a big believer in streaming video anyway — half the time it lagged way behind the audio — and truly hopes all concerned here understand.
Still, the audio seems to be running smoothly.
“This was a cold-blooded killing of a police officer in the line of duty,” the smeary video image of the guy in front of the Justice Center says. “I think the evidence will show that the defendant, Sarah Weiss, pulled the trigger.”
Performance artists, Furnell thinks. What a bunch. Still, anything’s better than the woman who dresses her dogs up for tea once a month, then tapes the whole damn thing.
The tape continues: “Mike Ryan was a good cop… Mike Ryan was a family man… a man who woke up every day and chose-chose-to strap on a gun and jump into the fray… Mike Ryan died in the line of duty protecting the people of this city.”
Furnell pops open his diet Dr Pepper.
“So the next time you find yourself picking through a pile of garbage, or hiding in the bushes like some pervert, or running down the street with a forty-pound video camera just so you can invade the privacy of a heartbroken ten-year-old girl in a wheelchair, I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself what the hell it is you do for a living…”
“Damn straight,” Furnell says as he unwraps his dessert.
“Sometimes, the monster is real, people,” the man says. “Sometimes, the monster has a pretty face and a perfectly ordinary name. This time, the monster is called Sarah Weiss.”
There is a break in the video, then, a new video image.
A young man, wearing Ray-Bans, sitting in a wing chair, in a brightly lit room.
Furnell nearly chokes on his soft drink when the man in the sunglasses says the words.
Within sixty seconds he is talking to his cousin Wallace. Wallace Braxton works the night shift at WKYC, the Cleveland affiliate station of NBC.
“Are you sure?” Wallace asks for the second time, already punching in his boss’s speed-dial number.
“Absolutely,” Furnell says. “Absolutely sure. He said, ‘Here, tonight, live, a police officer is going to commit suicide.’”
68
The house is dark.
Bobby Dietricht had rung the bell, knocked on the front door, knocked on the back door, listened for a dog, listened for footsteps, peered in the windows. He had even tossed a few pebbles at the upstairs windows before hiding behind the huge maple tree on the front lawn.
Nothing.
Then he had repeated everything, just to be sure.
The house is unoccupied, he concluded.
Or else someone inside sleeps the sleep of the dead.
Carla rolls up in front of Jeremiah Cross’s house, headlights off. She meets Bobby around back and apprises him of her meeting with Denny Sanchez. Together they climb the small back porch, position themselves on either side of the door. Bobby pulls open the storm door and knocks one last time. He presses the doorbell and, in the stillness of the night, they can both hear the bell, loud and clear.
No answer, no lights flipping on upstairs, no response at all. They draw their weapons.
Bobby holds open the storm door, tries the handle of the inner door, turns it. It is unlocked. He nods at Carla.
Weapons out front, the two police officers step inside, knowing that establishing probable cause to enter these premises, at this moment, is going to be uphill all the way if Jeremiah Cross has anything to do with these homicides.
But Jack Paris is in trouble, and thus there is no hesitation.
Silently, they agree to take their chances in court.
Five minutes later, at eleven-forty, the house has been searched, but not scoured. The first floor and basement contain nothing out of the ordinary, nothing any other upwardly mobile lawyer wouldn’t have in his house. They had found no bodies, no blood, no sacrificial altars, no body parts in the freezer. If Jeremiah Cross is a serial murderer, he is one of the tidiest ever.
As Bobby Dietricht and Carla Davis begin to mount the stairs to give the second floor a more thorough search-drawers, nightstands, some boxes they had seen in closets-Carla’s phone rings. “Hang on,” she says, but Bobby continues up the stairs.
Carla steps into the kitchen. The raid is coming down in twenty minutes and this is probably the call. Thankfully, she is still within five minutes or so of the Westwood Road address. She steps into the kitchen, pulls her phone from her pocket. “Davis.”
“Sergeant Davis, this is Dennis Sanchez.”
“Yes, Denny, thanks for calling me right back. I appreciate it.”
“Have you got a minute right now?”
“Absolutely.”
“I think we’ve got something,” Bobby yells from upstairs. “There’s a door at the back of the bedroom closet…”
“Wait for me, Bobby,” Carla says, then puts her finger in her other ear. “Go ahead. I’m sorry.”
Sanchez continues: “I talked to Chief Blake and he asked me to call you. Earlier, you made an inquiry about a man named Cross, yes?”
“That’s right.”
Bobby yells: “It looks like… like some kind of altar. I think we’ve got this prick.”
Sanchez asks: “As in Jeremiah Cross of Powell Road, Cleveland Heights?”
“Yes,” Carla replies, trying to pay attention to two things at once. “Why?”
“Can I ask what your interest is in Mr. Cross?”
“We like him in a homicide,” Carla says. “That’s really all I can say at this point.”
Bobby says: “Holy shit.”
Sanchez takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “Bad news, then, I’m afraid. We just got the dental lab records an hour ago. Jeremiah Cross was shot to death in Cain Park a week ago. Had his hands cut off, too.”
Jesus, Carla thinks. Cross is not our actor.
Cross was the DOA in Cain Park!
And that means Sanchez adds: “As of an hour ago, my John Doe became a good lawyer. I’ve got a team on the way to his house right now.”
— setup.
Bobby.
From upstairs: “There’s some kind of… hel-lo… what the fuck is this?”
“Bobby, no!”
In the instant before the explosion, as Carla rounds the corner and mounts the steps, she feels the air being sucked out of her lungs, even before she feels the searing
heat of the blast.
On the third step, something punches through the drywall, just over her head, showering her in blackened gypsum. Then, a streak of flames chases down the stairs to her left, followed by a dark shape.
Carla Davis falls to her knees, lungs full of smoke, eyes burning, and realizes that the smoldering shape is Bobby Dietricht.
69
The gun is in his coat pocket. For the moment. He had stepped inside her apartment and shut off most of the lights. She looks at the bloody silver earring on the coffee table. Celeste’s earring. She chances another look out the window. Jesse Ray is still waiting in his car.
Her one thought is: Can I throw something that far?
“I don’t care anymore,” she says, trying to stall. On the mantel is a heavy bronze bust of Beethoven, about the size of her fist. If she could just get the window open, or broken, she would have one shot at pitching as far as she could, hopefully hitting somewhere, anywhere, on Jesse Ray’s car. “I’m done. I’m not going to hurt anybody. My daughter will be cared for. Do what you have to do.”
“Do you know how much could happen to you by the time your friend makes it up here? A lot. All of it bad.”
“Take your best shot.”
“I want you to pick up the phone, call him, tell him everything is all right.”
“No.”
Jean Luc steps over to the window. Mary takes a step back, away from him. They look at the parking lot together, where the dark sedan idles next to the pay phone, at the cigarette smoke curling up into the night sky.
Jean Luc laughs. “That’s your savior?”
Mary is just about to pick up the bronze bust when a white van pulls into the Dairy Barn lot across the street, screeching to a halt. On its side is the NBC peacock logo. On the roof, a satellite rack.
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