by The Echo Man
'I think she wants to give you your name tag,' Tolonen said. He had an accent. Maybe Finnish. 'Oh.'
The drunk man made a production of reaching into his pocket for his wallet. He pulled it out, made a bigger deal of extracting one of his business cards, a big smile on his face as if this were the cleverest bit ever. 'It looks like I'm somebody named Barry Swanson,' he said. 'Like the frozen dinner.'
Like the frozen adolescence, Jessica thought. She handed Barry Swanson his ID and a program. Swanson immediately dropped it all on the floor. Tolonen picked up the material, clipped the name tag on his wobbly friend.
'Sorry,' Bowman said to Jessica. 'He's a forensic chemist. He doesn't get out much.'
Jessica watched them walk away, wondering how crimes ever got solved.
When Jessica was relieved by a member of the task force, a detective out of West Division named Deena Yeager, she walked over to the front desk, surveyed the crowded lobby. David Albrecht had not gotten permission to film inside the ballroom, but he was allowed to shoot footage in the lobby and out on the street. Jessica saw that he had snagged some talking-head interview time with some pretty heavy hitters.
Just about everyone in the room had some connection to law enforcement. There were retired detectives, prosecutors, forensic professionals of every discipline, men and women who worked in the processing of fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood, documents. There were pathologists, anthropologists, psychologists, people who worked in behavioral science and mathematics. She'd heard there was a small contingent from Keishicho, the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department.
She saw Hell Rohmer and Irina Kohl, pretending to be merely colleagues. It didn't take a seasoned detective to detect the occasional brush of hands, or the more than occasional longing glance. She saw judges, lawyers, bailiffs, along with a handful of ADAs.
She did not see Kevin Byrne.
Chapter 75
Lucy Doucette stood at the end of the hallway on the twelfth floor.
Her shift ended at six-thirty, but she asked Audrey Balcombe if there were any credits to be had and it turned out that three of the guests had requested housekeeping twice a day. She imagined these people were in some kind of lab or forensic work and had a serious germ phobia. Regardless, she was able to stay on for an extra two hours. Now she was just killing time.
Lucy knew that the moment she swiped her card in the electronic lock on the door to 1208 it would go on the record. She was scared out of her wits to go back in there, but she had been scared so long it just didn't matter anymore.
She looked over her shoulder. The hallway was deserted, but Lucy knew she was not alone, not technically. She had once been in the main security station and had seen the big monitors. All staff knew where the closed-circuit cameras were. At least, the cameras they knew about, the obvious ones on the ceiling. At the end of each hallway was a sideboard and a mirror, and Lucy always wondered if the mirrors were two-way mirrors and maybe had a camera behind them.
Before she could stop herself, Lucy knocked on the door to Room 1208.
'Housekeeping.'
Nothing. She knocked again, repeated the word. Silence from within. She leaned closer to the door. There was no sound of a TV, a radio, a conversation. The general rule was two announcements, then enter.
Lucy tried one last time, got no response, then swiped her card, eased open the door.
'Housekeeping,' she said once more, her voice barely above a whisper. She slipped inside, let the door close behind her. It shut with a loud and final click, meaning that the lock had irrevocably registered that she was in Room 1208.
The room looked exactly the same as it had the last time. The minibar was untouched, the bed had not been slept in, the wastebasket beneath the desk was empty. She peeked into the bathroom. Nothing had been disturbed in there, either. The toilet paper was still in a point, the soaps wrapped. Sometimes the nicer guests tried to hang the towels back the way they were, but Lucy could always tell. They never got them exactly right. She could also tell if someone had taken a shower or bath, just by the smell, the damp sweetness of body gel and shampoo that hung in the air.
She stepped back to the door, put her ear to it, listened for sounds in the hallway. It was silent. She walked to the closet, opened the door. The garment bag hung there like a body at a gallows. She reached out slowly, turned over the ID tag, her hand shaking.
This bag belongs to George Archer.
Lucy felt a chill ripple through her body. His name was George Archer. All these years she had tried to imagine her kidnapper's name. Everyone had a name. Whenever she read a newspaper or a magazine, whenever she watched a movie or a TV show, whenever she was in a place like a doctor's office or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and someone said a name out loud she wondered: Is that his name? Could that person be the man in her nightmares? Now she knew. George Archer. It was, at the same moment, the most benign and the most frightening name she'd ever heard.
She closed the closet door, walked quickly over to the dresser, her heart pounding. She eased open the bottom drawer. The same shirts were inside - one blue, one white, one white with thin gray stripes. She mind-printed the way they were arrayed in the drawer so she could put them back in precisely the same manner. She bunched the three shirts together, lifted them. They seemed almost hot to her touch. But when she looked beneath the shirts, she saw that the picture was gone.
Had she imagined it?
No. It had been there. She had never seen that particular photograph before, but she knew where it had been taken. It had been taken at the ice-cream parlor on Wilmot Street. It was a photo of her mother, and her mother was wearing the red pullover sweater that Lucy had taken from Sears at the mall.
Lucy turned, looked at the rest of the room. It suddenly seemed foreign, as if she had never been here before. She put the shirts back in the drawer, arranging them carefully. She noticed something in the pocket of the shirt on top, the blue one. It was a piece of paper, a piece of Le Jardin notepad paper.
Lucy slipped her fingers gently into the pocket, took out the paper. It read:
Meet me here on Sunday night at 9:30. Love, Lucy.
It was her handwriting.
It was a note she had written and had left in the room for Mr. Archer to find.
She looked at her watch. It was 9:28.
The room began to spin. It felt for a moment as though the floor beneath her was about to give way. She slammed the drawer shut. It no longer mattered if she didn't get everything back the way it was supposed to be. The only thing that mattered was getting out of this room.
She recoiled from the dresser as if it were on fire, and suddenly heard—
—the bell.
Her bell. Her special bell.
Lucy felt calm, completely at peace. She knew what she had to do, what she must do. She walked to the hotel room door, propped it open. Then she entered the closet, closed the door, sat on the floor.
Once inside she smelled apples, pipe smoke, the essence of George Archer, the essence of evil. But this time she was not afraid.
As footsteps passed by the closet - two sets, a few minutes apart - the night closed in around her, and Lucy Doucette remembered it all.
'It's okay, Eve, ' he said. 'There's been an accident. I will take care of you.'
He held out his hand. On it he wore a ring in the shape of a snake. The air was thick with smoke, the sky darkened from it.
' What kind of accident?' she asked.
Mr. Archer opened the door to his car. Lucy got in. 'A plane crash,' he said. 'A bad plane crash.'
'Where's my mom?'
'She wants me to watch after you. She's going to go help the people where the plane crashed.'
'My mom is?'
'Yes, Eve.'
Mr. Archer started the car.
He led her down the narrow wooden steps, through a small door into a drafty room with stone walls. The room was lit only with candles. It seemed as though there were hundreds of them. The room smell
ed like bad perfume and fermenting apples. Even the dust and cobwebs were cold.
When Mr. Archer left, and Lucy heard the door at the top of the stairs lock, she saw that there was another girl sitting there. She was about Lucy's age, eleven or so, but she was wearing a grown-up dress. It was spangly and short, and had straps over the shoulders. The girl's face was smeared with make-up. She had been crying for a long time. Her eyes were red and puffy.
'Who are you?' Lucy asked.
The girl shivered.
'I'm ... I'm Peggy.'
'Why are you here?'
The girl did not answer. Lucy looked at the girl's arms and legs. There were deep purple bruises on them. Then she looked over and saw a second dress hanging from one of the pipes in the ceiling.
A long time passed. Hours and hours of which Lucy had no mind, no memory. Days of darkness.
On the third day she took a bubble bath. The bathroom was in a small room off the cellar. The walls were a pink enamel. The sink had gold-colored faucets.
When it was dark Mr. Archer came downstairs to get her. He brought her up to the dining room for the first time. The table was set for grown-ups. Wine glasses and more candles. Lucy found herself in her own grown-up dress, and wearing high heels that were too big for her. Mr. Archer was dressed up like a man in an old movie. He had on a white bow tie. He walked to the kitchen.
Lucy looked at the window. She walked across the room, edged it open, slipped through.
'Eve!' Mr. Archer yelled.
Lucy ran. She ran as far and for as long as she could, through endless apple orchards, tripping and falling, scraping her knees and elbows, mushing the rotting apples beneath her. She looked over her shoulder, watching for Mr. Archer. She didn't see him. She soon came to a large pipe that emptied into a lake, crouched down inside, waited. She didn't know how long she was there. Hours and hours. She must have cried herself to sleep, because the next thing she knew there was a light in her face.
'It's okay,' the man with the flashlight said.
But it wasn't. It wasn't okay.
They talked to her for hours, but Lucy didn't say a word. What happened to her was locked away inside.
Her mother took her home. Time passed, and the man with the ring in the shape of a snake faded from her mind but took up faceless residence in that nest of fear inside her, flying overhead in the darkness of her dreams.
At night she would hear him humming, she would hear the sound of the car door slamming, the creak of the old wooden steps, the softness of his voice, she would hear—
The bell.
The bell rang again.
It seemed to come from far away, as if it were at the end of that long drainage pipe in which she had crawled. For the briefest of moments she smelled the sewage, felt the dampness of the air. Then it was gone.
Lucy looked around. It took a while for her to realize where she was. She was in the hotel. Le Jardin. She knew every inch of this place. She looked around the dark closet, felt overhead.
How much time had passed? She didn't know. She stood, opened the closet door, stepped into the room. The air had changed, changed in a way you could only know from being in a place day after day, knowing its walls, it ceilings, its corners, its very presence.
The door to the hallway was closed. Lucy looked at her watch. She hadn't been gone long. She had to get out of this room. Mr. Archer could be back any second.
She turned to leave, but suddenly felt lightheaded. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. Her mind began to clear, but something was wrong. Something felt wet underneath her. She got up, looked at her hands. They were coated in bright, glossy scarlet. She turned around and saw, in the dim light, the form under the blood- soaked sheets.
Lucy felt the contents of her stomach come up inside her throat. She backed away, certain that her heart was going to explode. She could no longer hold it in. She vomited on the floor.
Then she looked at the telephone on the desk. It seemed a mile away. The smell of her own vomit reached her at the same time as the metallic smell of blood. She was going to be sick again.
She ran to the bathroom.
Chapter 76
Jessica watched the show from the back of the Crystal Room. The speaker at the lectern was a pathologist from Toledo, formerly with the Ohio Bureau of Investigation. He was talking about a cold case that took place in a suburb of Toledo in 1985, a case involving a woman and her elderly mother who were bludgeoned to death with a long piece of steel, believed to be the support beam of a single bed frame.
Behind the lecturer, photographs of the crime scene were projected on a screen.
Jessica watched the photographs come and go. She realized that the man could have been from Tucson or Toronto or Tallahassee. In some ways it was all the same. But not to the families of the victim. And not to the investigators whose task it was to root out the people responsible for the crime and bring them to justice. She had been at it long enough, and knew enough people in her line of work, to know that an unsolved crime eats away at your soul until it is either closed or replaced by a new horror, a new puzzle. And even then it does not disappear, but rather makes room.
She thought about Joseph Novak's diary.
What was his connection? All she could find on Marcato LLC was that it had been formed nearly fifteen years earlier, and listed as its primary business the publishing of music. Joseph Novak, by all accounts, had a partner. But no one at any bank had any record of anyone other than Novak.
'Detective?'
A man's voice. Close. Jessica spun around. It was Frederic Duchesne, the dean of Prentiss Institute. He had approached without a sound. Not good. She was distracted, which meant she was vulnerable. She took a deep breath, tried to fashion a smile.
'Mr. Duchesne.'
'I'm sorry if I frightened you,' Duchesne said.
Frightened wasn't the word, Jessica thought. Provoked would be a better term. 'Not a problem,' she said, meaning something else. 'What can I do for you, Mr. Duchesne?'
'Frederic. Please.'
'Frederic,' she said. She glanced around the room. All was well. For the time being.
'I was wondering if you received the material I sent.'
'Yes, we did. Thank you very much.'
'Do you have a moment to talk?'
Jessica glanced at the clock over the door. It was just slightly little less rude than looking at her watch. She had a little bit of time. 'Sure.'
They walked to a quiet corner of the room.
'Well, when you were in, your partner asked about program music. Symphonic poems.'
'Yes,' Jessica said. 'Do you have further thoughts on this?'
'I do,' Duchesne said. 'Aesthetically, the tone poem is in some ways related to opera, the difference being that the words are not sung to the audience. There are examples of absolute music that contain narrative of sorts.'
Jessica just stared.
'Okay, what I'm getting at is that, while there may be nothing in the music itself, a lot of times material has been written as an adjunct to the music - a poetic epigraph, if you will.'
'You mean, written after the fact?'
'Yes.'
Duchesne looked out over the room, then back.
'Are you a fan of classical music, detective?'
Jessica sneaked a covert glance at her watch. 'Sure,' she said. 'I can't say I know too much about it, but I know what I like when I hear it.'
'Tell me,' Duchesne began, 'do you ever go to concerts?'
'Not too often,' she said. 'My husband is not a big classical-music fan. He's more of a Southside Johnny guy.'
Duchesne shot a quick glance at Jessica's left hand. She never wore her wedding ring - or any jewelry, for that matter - when she was in the field. Too many opportunities to lose it, not to mention having it give away your position when you needed silence.
'That was terribly forward of me,' Duchesne said. 'Please forgive me.'
'No harm done,' Jessica said.
'No
, I've made a fool of myself. Mea culpa.'
Jessica needed a way to wrap this up. 'Mr. Duchesne - Frederic - I really do appreciate this information. I'll pass it along to the other detectives working the case. You never know. It might lead to something.'
Duchesne seemed to be a bit flustered. He was probably not used to being shot down. He was not bad-looking in a Julian Sands kind of way, cultured and refined: probably a hell of a catch in his social circle. 'Please feel free to call me anytime if you think of something else that might be helpful,' Jessica added.
Duchesne brightened a little, although it was clear he realized what she was doing - trying to placate him. 'I certainly will.'
'By the way, what brings you here tonight?'
Duchesne pulled a visitor badge out of his pocket, clipped it to his sport coat. 'I've done some work as a forensic audiologist,' he said. 'Strictly on a contract basis. My specialty is physical characteristics and measurement of acoustic stimuli.'
You never know, Jessica thought. She extended her hand. They shook. 'Have fun.'
As she watched Duchesne walk across the room, her cellphone vibrated. She looked at the screen. It was Byrne.
'Kevin. Where are you?'
All she heard was the hiss of silence. She wasn't sure Byrne was still there. Then: 'I've got to go in for more tests.'
It didn't register. 'What are you talking about?'
Another pause. 'They read my MRI. They want me to go back for more tests.'
'Did they say what it was about?'
'They don't want you back because everything is all right, Jess.'
'Okay,' Jessica said. 'We'll deal with it. I'll go with you.'
More silence. Then Jessica heard a bell on Byrne's end. Was that the sound of an elevator? 'Where are you?'
No answer.
'Kevin?' The silence was maddening. 'When do they want you to—'
'The original homicides. The cold cases. It was right in front of us. I didn't get it until I was driving up the parkway.'
