by Sara Reinke
The man reached out from behind her and touched her arm. Jo shrieked, scrambling to her feet, dancing clumsily back from the bed, her eyes flown wide with terror.
He was awake and blinked dazedly at her. “Please…” he murmured, moving his hand as if to try and touch her again.
She reached down, snatching wildly, grabbing her keys. She scrambled to her feet again, and shoved the can of mace toward him, her finger poised against the trigger. “Don’t touch me,” she said to him, her voice hiccupping with fright.
“Please,” he breathed again. “Please…listen to me. You…you don’t…”
His voice faded and he slumped, hanging his head as if overcome with exhaustion. Jo whirled, her heart pounding frantically in her chest like a panicked dove, and she darted out the bedroom door.
“No,” she heard the man call out weakly. “No, don’t go…wait…”
Jo stumbled down the corridor, looking desperately for some way out. She ended up in a living room with more of the lovely hardwood floors and windows. A large sectional couch divided the room into perpendicular planes and an elegant marble fireplace dominated the far wall.
She saw a small flight of steps that led down to an entry way, and a front door. She staggered down the steps, somehow not spilling ass over elbows in her mad rush, and threw open the door.
A woman stood on the front stoop with an armload of groceries, fumbling with her housekeys. She was older, maybe in her late fifties, with a fading brown rinse in her carefully coiffed hair. A little girl stood beside her, her hair up in pigtails, fastened with cheery red ribbons. Jo froze in the entryway, her breath caught in a panicked tangle in her throat and the three of them stared at one another for what felt like an eternity.
“Look, Marie, she’s awake,” the little girl said suddenly, brightly, and she smiled up at Jo.
“E-excuse me,” Jo stammered. “I just…I…I’m sorry…”
She brushed past them and bolted, her clogs smacking furiously against her heels. She dashed down the front steps of an old, brick-front brownstone, stumbling on the sidewalk and blinking stupidly in the bright, glaring sun.
“Well, I never―!” she heard the woman exclaim hotly. Jo looked over her shoulder and saw she was coming down the steps after her. “You, there! Stop!”
The little girl remained on the stoop, gazing after Jo with interest. She seemed completely unsurprised by Jo’s presence or appearance, as if she knew exactly what Jo had been doing in her home.
That makes one of us, kid, Jo thought, and then she turned and ran down the sidewalk.
CHAPTER TWO
Paul Frances didn’t mean to work on his weekend off. A detective with the city’s homicide division, he put in too many long, hard hours of grueling, exhausting, often heartbreaking work. Most of the time, he’d work nearly sixty hours each week, working until all hours of the night, and most weekends. But he’d been on the force for damn near fifteen years, and that kind of tenure helped insure that at least one weekend out of each and every month was unequivocally his, without interruption. He’d turn off his cell phone and place it with his gun and badge in the side drawer of the desk in his study, locking it all up for forty-eight hours each month. He would spend quality time with his wife, Victoria and their two daughters, Mary Kate―or M.K., as the fifteen-year-old preferred to be called these days―and Bethany, whether they wanted his company or not.
“This is so lame!” M.K. bawled as she stomped down the hall and into the bathroom. She slammed the door, apparently not thrilled with Paul’s idea of heading out to the zoo.
The phone began to ring and Paul hoped Vicki would let the machine get it. He stood over his desk in his study, fingering the well-worn tab of an opened manilla file folder. He hadn’t meant to open it. He hadn’t intended to work. It was his weekend off.
A pair of stark crime scene photographs, one clipped to each side of the manilla folder, stared up at him. They showed a young woman, nude from the waist down, sprawled in an unnatural position behind a cluster of dumpsters. The ground beneath her was littered with broken glass and dried leaves, all choked together in a broad pool of her blood.
Lindsay Amanda Williams, age twenty-three. A bartender at a The Wailin’ Wall, local hangout where college kids gathered to listen to live blues music. She had been assaulted one year ago in the alley behind the bar, suffering blunt force trauma to her head and face. She had been forcibly raped and then stabbed repeatedly. One of the deeper knife wounds had severed her carotid artery and she had bled to death.
That was the first one. Two more had quickly followed. Wendy Andrews, killed in an elevator at the office building where she worked nights. Veronica Leyton, who had left a waterfront restaurant two months ago after enjoying dinner and cocktails with a friend, and who had turned up two days later in a storm sewer service access across the street from where she had parked her car. Their files lay beneath Lindsay Williams’, each with their own chilling crime scene photos to bear mute witness to their suffering. Both had also been beaten about the face and head. Both were brutally raped, and both had been stabbed to death.
“You ready, Beth?” Paul asked, catching movement out of the corner of his eye and looking up from the folder as his youngest daughter walked past the study.
She glanced unhappily over her shoulder at the bathroom where her sister had barricaded herself and nodded. “Yes, Daddy,” she said, buttoning up her cardigan.
He hoped that, unlike M.K., Bethany would never be too “cool” to call him Daddy. He dropped her a wink and closed the file folder. “M.K. will be alright,” he assured her.
“Mike Franklin works at the zoo,” Bethany said. “He’s a junior. She likes him.”
“Paul?” Vicki called from downstairs. Apparently, that mental telepathy that was supposed to have been forged between them over the almost twenty years of their marriage was failing that Saturday morning. She’d answered the phone.
“So you think it would embarrass your sister if I started making monkey noises in the gorilla house and doing this?” Paul asked Bethany, hunching his shoulders and scratching at his armpits, grunting loudly all the while.
Bethany’s eyes widened and she giggled. “Daddy, you wouldn’t dare.”
“Paul?” Vicki called again as she came up the narrow staircase from the kitchen, holding the portable phone.
“In the study,” he called back. He passed Bethany a wink as Vicki stepped into the doorway. He knew Vicki didn’t miss what was on the desk in front of him. She knew exactly what it was, and what he had been doing. She didn’t say anything aloud, but the furrow between her brows spoke silent volumes.
“It’s Marie,” she said, holding the phone out to him. “She says it’s important.”
He accepted the phone from her and cupped the mouthpiece with his palm. “See if you can get her out of there so we can go,” he said, nodding toward the bathroom door.
Vicki raised her brow. “Are we going?” she asked, sparing a pointed and undisguised glance at the file folders. “You’re sure?”
“Yes, I promise, we’re going,” he said. Bethany followed her mother as she turned and disappeared down the corridor, and Paul removed his hand from over the phone. “Yes, Marie, what is it?”
* * *
He had been the first to realize the pattern. It hadn’t taken a genius to see the murders had all been committed by the same perpetrator, even though there had been no physical evidence to tie the cases together ― much less to implicate any particular individual as the culprit. No prints, no hairs, no fibers, nothing.
Paul had been the first to look further than the two dead girls. Finding no common threads between them, he had suspected they were random victims. He had turned to recent assault and rape cases, going back almost five years, uncovering a pattern that clearly indicated something sinister had been brewing in their midst for awhile.
The press had dubbed him “the Watcher.” Paul had found eleven incidents of rape and related assaults in
the preceding five years that he suspected could be attributed to the Watcher. Again, there was no physical evidence. The assailant in the rape cases had been methodical and meticulous in leaving nothing behind that might implicate him. Each case had grown progressively more violent as the rapist had strengthened his nerve and grown more confident,bolder. As he worked his way toward murder, Paul had realized.
The Watcher stalked his victims for weeks, if not months at a time, prior to his assault. Sometimes he would hit multiple victims within weeks of each other. Paul suspected that for every woman he attacked, the Watcher kept at least three under surveillance, simply biding his time and waiting for an opportune moment to present itself. He could pick and choose, depending on his mood and whim, and strike without warning.
Last year, the city’s Police Commissioner had appointed a special task force within the Homicide Division dedicated to finding and apprehending the Watcher. Paul was named to head the task force. He hadn’t enjoyed a weekend off since.
This was to have been the first, but as he hung up the phone following the nearly frantic phone call from his younger brother’s housekeeper, Marie, he knew it was not to be.
She met him at the front door to Jay’s brownstone. She was a good-looking woman in a matronly sort of way. Paul couldn’t recall having ever seen her in anything but dowdy skirts. Her hems unfailingly came to just below her knees, and she had a seemingly endless selection of sensible SAS shoes to complement the look.
But she genuinely loved Jay’s daughter, Emma and had taken a kindly interest in his brother, Jay, the tragic young widower. Paul remembered only too well the night two years earlier when they woke in the night to a frantic phone call. Emma had been spending the night at Paul’s while her parents celebrated their wedding anniversary. There had been a violent accident…ice on the road, and a tractor trailer skidding out of control and into oncoming traffic. Jay had tried to swerve, but his car had slammed over the guardrail and down a fifteen-foot embankment. The car rolled at least four times before coming to rest on its roof. Jay had been rushed to the hospital and spent nearly six weeks comatose in intensive care. Jay’s wife Lucy had been killed at the scene.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Marie said as she opened the door, her hair neatly bundled, her skirt hem at her knees, her shoes ugly but practical.
“Uncle Paul!” Emma cried in delight as he came up the steps from the entryway. She leaped up from the sofa, where she’d been absorbed in a coloring book, and hurtled across the room. She leaped into his arms, throwing her arms around his neck in a ferocious hug.
“Hey, kiddo,” Paul said, presenting her with the sort of loud, smacking kiss that his own daughters would never endure from him. Grown ups were still cool when you were a week away from six years old.
“Emma, sweetie, why don’t you go in the kitchen and get a piece of cheese out of the fridge?” Marie suggested. “You look ready for a snack.”
“Sure!” Emma said brightly. She looked up at Paul, the spitting image of Jay, with enormous, dark brown eyes and thick, lustrous brown hair. “Uncle Paul, would you like some cheese? It’s very good. And Marie says it’s for…fortnified with vitamins.”
“Is it now?” Paul asked, smiling fondly at his niece. “Maybe in a minute, kiddo.”
After she’d pranced off to get her snack, Marie drew close to Paul and said in a low voice, “I don’t know what’s going on, Paul, but you should have seen that girl he brought home. She was just filthy. I’m sure she was a junkie.”
“Did you see him come home with her?”
Marie shook her head. “No, but I was surprised when I got here yesterday afternoon and saw his car in the drive. I hadn’t heard him get up for work, and he wasn’t up when I left in the morning to bring Emma to school, but I thought surely he wouldn’t keep in bed all day. And his bedroom door has been closed all this while. He never closes his door―you know that. Emma wanted to get a video out of his room this morning, but I didn’t know what was going on, so I opened the door first and peeked. I wasn’t trying to be nosy, but…”
Matronly though she may be, Marie had “accidentally” come in on Jay a time or two after he’d stepped out of his shower. Jay had told Paul this with a sort of bemused look on his face. She’d never caught him completely naked, but she’d come upon him with a towel around his waist. Although she’d always seem sincerely appalled at the encounters, Paul liked to tease Jay that this wasn’t necessarily so.
“Maybe deep down inside of that retired-nun exterior lurks the heart of a sexual deviant, Jay,” he’d said.
Jay had looked at him, his brow arched as he’d tried his damndest not to bust out laughing.
“Maybe she wants you, Jay. I bet she dreams about you at night, all naked and glistening out of the tub…”
“Get bent, Paul,”Jay had said, flipping him off, losing his battle to suppress his laughter.
Paul wondered, with momentary amusement, if Marie had been curious to see if Jay had taken someone to bed while she “wasn’t trying to be nosy.”
“I was shocked to find him in bed with that girl,” Marie said, her nose wrinkling as if she smelled something rotten. “I tell you, it’s just not like Jay to go out to the bars, drinking and picking up that sort of trash.”
“You think he was drunk?”
“What else could it be?” Marie exclaimed.
Paul had an idea of what else, but kept it to himself.
“They were in bed together,” Marie said, dropping her voice and glancing cautiously toward the kitchen. “And then this morning, she just burst out of the front door, all wide-eyed and filthy. Just filthy, Paul! I wish you could have seen her face. I’ve looked all over, trying to make sure she didn’t steal anything, but―”
“Jay’s in his room?” Paul asked.
Marie nodded. She started to say more, but Paul had heard enough. He brushed past her and walked down the corridor toward Jay’s bedroom. “I’m going to stay with him awhile,” he said. “He’s probably got himself on hell of a hangover and just needs to sleep it off. You go on and take Emma over to my house. Vicki and the girls would love to visit.”
“But the girl―” Marie began.
“Marie, he’s a grown man,” Paul said, pausing and looking at her over his shoulder. “He can do what he wants as far as that goes. I’ll talk to him about it and make sure he knows it upsets you.”
“Well, you should have seen her―”
“I’ll talk to him about it.”
“He needs to think about Emma. There are plenty of nice girls out there without him bringing home that kind of―”
“I’ll talk to him, Marie.”
He couldn’t even tell if his younger brother was breathing when he first entered. The room was dark and shadow-draped as evening approached. Paul walked quietly over to the bed and sat down next to Jay, watching his brother’s chest, waiting for it to rise. At last it did, slowly, and Jay sighed out a long, deep gasp of air.
“Jay?” Paul said gently, brushing his brother’s tousled hair back from his face.
Jay didn’t stir.
“It happened again, didn’t it?” Paul whispered, anguished. “Ah, Christ, Jay…”
He sat at Jay’s bedside, holding his hand and watching him sleep. It was still a painfully familiar posture for him, as he had spent more hours than he could count in that position while Jay had been in a coma.
When he had been twelve years old, and Jay had been only a little tyke of six, Paul had learned that his brother could raise the dead. It had been a bitterly cold day in early February, and Barnham, Kansas had been blanketed with nearly two feet of pristine, virginal snow. School had been cancelled and their mother had sent both Paul and Jay outside to play with one of Paul’s friends, a neighbor boy with the rather unfortunate name of Danny Thomas.
Paul could close his eyes and still see his mother standing in the kitchen of their large, rambling farm house, running hot water into the sink and scraping the remains of breakf
ast into the dog’s dinner bowl while Bowzer looked on, giddy with the promise of half-eaten sausage links and scraps of eggs-over-easy. Dolores Frances had been dead for three years. Their father, John, had followed less than a year later; Paul had always suspected from a broken heart.
On that winter day so long ago, the boys had gone off into the woods surrounding the Frances farm and had a snowball fight. Danny Thomas had climbed up into a tree to play Indian scout, sneak attacking Jay as the smaller, younger boy had toddled unaware into his line of sight. Paul had caught Jay with crossfire, and the two had belted Jay mercilessly, leaving him bawling and threatening to tell. In all of the commotion, Danny had fallen out of his perch in the tree. He broke his neck in the fall, and Paul and Jay had discovered him lifeless and sprawled in the snow.
“Go get Mom!” Paul had ordered Jay, falling to the ground next to his friend. He’d wrenched off his mittens and pawed helplessly at Danny’s body, trying to feel for his heartbeat. Jay hadn’t moved, and Paul had looked up at him, choked with panicked tears. “Goddammit, don’t just stand there! Go get Mom! Now!”
Jay hadn’t gone to get their mother. He had dropped to his knees, his gaze distant and dazed, as if he had been in shock. He slipped off his mittens and reached down, ignoring Paul’s cries and attempts to shove him away. He had pressed his hands against Daniel’s face, and there had been light, brilliant and blinding. Paul had screamed, his hands darting to cover his face as he crumpled sideways in the snow. He had felt the light, too, like the force from a nuclear blast, buffeting his body, tossing him aside, throwing snow and brambles and broken branches against him.
And then it had been over. He could see again, and watched as Jay drew clumsily to his feet, swaying unsteadily as he blinked down at Danny Thomas. His expression was utterly dazed, as if he had no idea where he was, or who Paul was. He blinked about vacuously and then turned about, stumbling back toward the farm house.
Danny had groaned, and Paul had scrambled to his side. The boy opened his eyes and tried to speak, but all that came out was a weird, cawing sound.
