“What kind of fluid samples?”
“Blood, it looks like.”
“Is this a crime scene?”
“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I have no idea what happened here.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He dreamed that he was running through the briars again, barefoot. The fires were much closer now, and he could feel the heat on his back, like an open furnace. Sparks were showering over his head and dropping onto the underbrush up ahead of him, so that he had to fight his way through bushes that were already blazing.
“Muster at the plank road, boys!” somebody was shouting, his voice hoarse with smoke. “Muster at the plank road!”
He kept his left elbow raised to protect his eyes from thorns and branches and to shield his cheek from the heat. A spark settled on his shoulder, eating through his shirt. He swatted it off, but it was still painful, and he could smell scorched cotton and burned skin.
He had a rough idea that the plank road was off to his left, about a quarter of a mile, but the woods in that direction were burning fiercely and he could hear men screaming as they were overtaken by the flames. Instead, he headed off to the right, hoping to be able to circle around the fires and reach the road a little farther up. He tried to hurry, but the underbrush was even thicker here, and he had to leap and scramble like a hare.
What was even more frightening than the approaching fire was the feeling that somebody was catching up with him, hurrying through the thickets as black and fluid as a shadow. And he knew that this somebody was intent on killing him—not angrily, but cold-bloodedly, and gruesomely, inflicting more pain than anybody could imagine.
He quickly turned his head. He could see a silhouette only a few yards behind him. A tall silhouette, with flapping wings. Its coattails were snagged by the briars, but that didn’t seem to slow it down at all, and he could hear its boots crackling through the bracken. Oh, Jesus. He simply didn’t have the strength to jump any farther. His clothes were tangled in the bushes and his hands and feet were ablaze with thorns.
He stopped, gasping, and the silhouette rushed into him, knocking the breath out of him. He found himself in suffocating darkness, in a cage of bones, struggling desperately to get himself free.
“Can’t breathe!” he screamed. “Can’t breathe!”
He found Father Thomas in the diocesan garden at the back of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, his sleeves rolled up, weeding. Father Thomas stood up as he approached, a plump, pink-faced man with a bow wave of white hair.
“Lieutenant Martin! My goodness! It’s been quite a while since we saw you!”
Decker looked around. “This is some garden, isn’t it?” The flower bed that Father Thomas was tending was bursting with cream and yellow roses, and their fragrance was so heady that it was almost erotic.
“We do our best.… I always think that to keep a beautiful garden is like saying a thank-you to God, for granting us such earthly delights.”
Decker had come to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart at least twice a week in the days after Cathy had been killed. He had knelt for hours inside its cool, echoing interior, under its high gold-relief ceilings, and tightly closed his eyes and prayed that it was still January, and that her murder had never happened. Oh, God, can’t you just wind back the clock?
The cathedral was unusual in that it had been financed and built entirely by one man, Thomas Fortune Ryan, the founder of the American Tobacco Company. Richmond had very few Catholics, but it was here that they could turn for hope and encouragement, a grand Romanesque building that proudly proclaimed the Church Militant—the Lord God and His angels in their eternal struggle against Satan and his devils.
Decker said, “I guess I got disillusioned with God. My fault. I asked Him for something impossible.”
“Don’t worry.” Father Thomas smiled. “I can assure you that God isn’t disillusioned with you. And who’s to say what’s impossible and what isn’t?”
He propped his hoe against his wheelbarrow and said, “Why don’t you come inside and have a drink?”
“Sure. It’s hot enough, isn’t it? There’s a couple of questions I need to ask you.”
“Of course. Always pleased to help the forces of law and order.”
He led Decker through to a brown-and-white-tiled kitchen with a large oak table and windows that were glazed with muted yellow glass. He opened up the icebox and took out a frosted jug of lemonade. “Sorry we don’t have any tequila.”
“You remembered,” Decker said, taking off his sunglasses.
“Well … let’s say there was more than one occasion when the condition in which you came here to pray owed more to the cactus spirit than the Holy Spirit.”
He poured them each a tumbler of lemonade, making sure that there were plenty of lemon slices floating in them. Decker said, “What can you tell me about Saint Barbara?”
“Saint Barbara? Is there any specific reason for this?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s why I came to see you. I mean, you’re the expert on patron saints, aren’t you?”
“I like to think so. Saint Barbara, well … Saint Barbara was removed from the Roman calendar sometime in the late 1960s and her cultus was suppressed. But there are still many who are devoted to her, especially in the military, and those who work with explosives, such as armorers and gunners and bomb technicians.
“She’s the patron saint of fire, you see, and lightning.”
Decker said, “I’ve been having this nightmare … I’m running away from a brushfire. The first time I had it, I had another dream right afterward. I saw Cathy, and Cathy said that she wants to protect me from Saint Barbara.”
Father Thomas raised his eyebrows. “I can’t think why you need protection from her, particularly if you were trying to escape from a fire. Saint Barbara is honored by firefighters and by anybody working with fireworks or explosives. That’s always assuming that your dream has any real significance, of course, and that it isn’t just a fragment of something that you accidentally picked up during the course of your day’s work.”
“Cathy said, ‘Saint Barbara wants her revenge.’ She said it as clear as if she were standing right next to me.”
“That’s very strange. Saint Barbara was supposed to have been very beautiful and gentle and forgiving. It was said that she lived in Thrace, in the third century, and the story is that she was locked in a high tower by her father, Dioscorus, for disobedience. While she was imprisoned she was tutored by a whole variety of philosophers and orators and poets. From them, she learned that the worship of many gods was nonsense, and she converted to Christianity.
“Her not-so-loving father denounced her to the local authorities, and they ordered him to kill her. She escaped, but her father caught her, dragged her home by her hair, tortured her, and cut her head off. But he got his just desserts. He was instantly struck by fire from heaven, and killed.
“Because of this, people used to ask Saint Barbara to protect them against fire and lightning and any other kind of death from the sky. You often used to see her image on fire stations and powder magazines and military arsenals, in a white robe, holding the palm of martyrdom in one hand and the chalice of happy death in the other.
“However, the official view today is that Saint Barbara is only a legend, and that somewhere along the line a pious fiction was mistakenly interpreted as history. So the likelihood is that your dream was nothing more than a dream.”
Decker said, “The trouble is, it didn’t stop at a dream. Saint Barbara’s name was written on the wall of my apartment last night, in what looked like blood, and underneath it somebody had left incense burning. Don’t ask me who. There was nobody there, and nobody in my apartment building saw any strangers entering or leaving.”
“I have to admit that I’m baffled,” Father Thomas said. “Although it’s academically interesting that the name Barbara means ‘stranger.’”
“I just wanted to know if you had any theories. Doesn’t matt
er how wild they are. I’m investigating the Maitland homicide and the Drewry homicide, and as you’ve probably seen on the news, we don’t have a single credible eyewitness and we don’t have any evidence whatsoever. I mean, not even a single fiber, or a speck of saliva, or a microscopic sample of dirt. There’s so much nothing that it’s unreal.
“We had exactly the same dearth of evidence when Cathy was killed, and I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s any kind of connection.”
Father Thomas picked a lemon slice out of his tumbler and thoughtfully sucked it. “Sour,” he said, when he caught the expression on Decker’s face. “For some reason, I’ve always liked sour. Mortification of the palate, I suppose.”
“So … you don’t have any ideas?”
“Not really, Lieutenant. But I’ve always been a strong believer in the divine messages that are brought to us in dreams. They may not make a whole lot of sense to us at first, but when we think back on them later, they can often give us striking insights into what is really happening to us. Sometimes I think that we’re much more in touch with the meaning of our existence when we’re asleep than we are when we’re supposedly awake.”
He leaned forward and said, very quietly, as if he were imparting the greatest secret in the universe, “Let me put it this way … if you were God, and you wanted to talk to your dearest creations, when would you choose to do it? By day, when their minds were filled with noise and work and family and worry? Or by night, when everything is quiet, and your words could be heard in all their perception and their clarity? And their strangeness, too.
“I may well be wrong, but my feeling is that when you understand what that means, ‘Saint Barbara wants her revenge,’ then you will understand everything.”
“Okay,” Decker said. “But what am I supposed to think of this?”
He unbuttoned his shirt and tugged it sideways to expose his left shoulder. There was an angry blister about an inch above his collarbone, like a cigarette burn, and it was weeping.
“In my nightmare last night, in that brushfire, a hot spark fell on me. When I woke up, my T-shirt was burned, and so was my skin.”
He held out his hands to show Father Thomas that they were crisscrossed in small red scratches. “I was fighting my way through a briar patch, and this is what happened. My feet are the same.”
Father Thomas took hold of his hands and examined them closely. Then he looked up at Decker with his china-blue eyes and said, “If what you are telling me is true, this is very disturbing. When nightmares begin to cause physical harm, that is a sign that something truly terrible is about to happen.”
“Father, I think it’s already begun.”
He was sitting with Hicks in the Third Street Diner when Beethoven summoned him on his cellphone. Da-da-da-DAH!
“Can’t you change that?” Hicks complained. “Even Strauss hated Beethoven. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Beethoven is a shit.’ He actually used those actual words.”
“What would you prefer? ‘The Camptown Races’?”
A woman’s voice said, “Lieutenant Martin? This is Lily Messenger from forensics?” She had a way of lifting her words at the end of every sentence so they sounded like questions.
“Sure. How are you, Officer Messenger?”
“I’m good, thanks. I have the preliminary analysis from those fluid samples I took from your apartment yesterday evening?”
“That was quick.”
“You’re right, the lettering on your wall was drawn in human blood? Type-A, Rh-negative?”
“I see. Right … I appreciate that.” He put the cell phone back on the table and said, “Saint Barbara was written in blood.”
“You’re kidding me. You think somebody’s trying to warn you off?”
“Warn me off what? And why? It’s not like we’re breathing down anybody’s neck.”
Hicks cut a pancake with the edge of his fork. “Maybe we need to go through this whole thing right from the beginning again. Search the crime scenes again, reinterview the neighbors and the passersby. Like you say, nobody can go through life without leaving some evidence behind them. We’ve just missed seeing it, that’s all.”
Decker shook his head, unconvinced. “How’s it going with the military memorabilia stores?”
“Only one more to check out, Wippler’s Sutlery on Fifth Street, and one online.”
Decker took one more bite of donut, grimaced, and dropped it back on his plate. “Let’s try looking at this thing another way. We don’t have any evidence, okay? But what else don’t we have? We don’t have motive. Alison Maitland was a very popular person and so was Major Drewry. All right, he was supposed to have been a bit of a grouch. But you don’t normally disembowel people just because they complain about dogs messing on their front lawn.
“Whatever the captain thinks, I don’t believe that two perpetrators could both be able to enter a house completely unseen and leave no forensic evidence whatsoever. I mean, that took some kind of skill that’s practically supernatural. So we only have one perpetrator and we have to work out why this one perpetrator wanted to kill both Alison Maitland and George Drewry. They don’t appear to have had anything in common. Different age, different sex, different background, different religion. But there must be something that connects them.”
Hicks wiped his mouth with his napkin and crumpled it up. “How about we check up on their personal histories, as far back as we can go?”
“Well … it’ll make us look as if we’re doing something, if nothing else.”
As they paid the check, Hicks suddenly said, “Did we pick up anything off that 911 call? I meant to ask you.”
Decker shook his head. “Nothing conclusive. Jimmy reckons there was some kind of electronic glitch, that’s all, but he’s still working on it.” What else was he going to say? That the screaming that had interrupted Alison Maitland’s cries for help were the very same screams that he was hearing in his nightmares?
They stepped out into the street. Hicks said, “You know that invitation to go out for a Mexican meal? Does that still stand?”
“Of course it does. How about Wednesday?”
“The thing is.… I don’t know … Rhoda doesn’t seem to have settled down here at all.”
“Give her some time, sport. She’ll get used to it.”
“She says that Richmond gives her a bad feeling, she doesn’t know why.”
“I told you, she’s probably missing her friends. Don’t worry, we’ll find her some new ones.”
“Well, I hope so. We had a pretty bad fight last night, and we never used to fight.”
Decker put on his sunglasses. “She wants attention, Hicks, that’s all. All women need attention.” To prove his point, he grinned at a ponytailed blonde in a red baseball cap. The blonde turned to smile back at him and almost collided with a streetlight.
Back at the office, his answering machine was flashing. Somebody had called him only two minutes ago. He pressed the play button, and there was some crackling and shuffling before he heard “Lieutenant Martin? This is Eunice Plummer. I thought you ought to know that Sandra’s seen him again. The So-Scary Man.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He called back immediately. “Ms. Plummer? Yes, thanks for your message. When was this?”
“Only about fifteen minutes ago. We were walking along Marshall Street window-shopping when Sandra saw him walking toward us.”
“Did you see him?”
“I’m afraid not. But Sandra was very frightened in case he recognized her, and she hid in a doorway.”
“Where exactly was this?”
“Between Eleventh and Twelfth. Sandra says he went into the hospital.”
“He did what?”
“She peeked out from the doorway to see how close he was, but he didn’t cross over Twelfth Street—he went into the Medical College Hospital.”
“Where’s your close-protection officer? Can you put her on the phone?”
“She didn’t sho
w. I thought maybe you’d decided we didn’t need her anymore.”
Shit, thought Decker. Cab and his goddamned cost-cutting. “Where are you now?” he asked Eunice, and then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and shouted out, “Hicks!”
“We’re at McDonald’s, on Eighth Street. Sandra was upset so I bought her a milkshake.”
“Stay there. We’re coming to pick you up. Hicks!”
Hicks appeared, carrying a heap of folders. “What’s the problem?”
“Sandra’s seen him again. The So-Scary Man. Let’s get going. This could be just what we’ve been waiting for.”
Jerry Maitland was sitting up in bed watching a program about Antarctic exploration in the 1900s—jerky black-and-white movies of men in furs and sealskins, standing in the snow.
“Of this American expedition in 1908, only one man, Clement Pearson, managed to return to base camp alive. He attributed his survival to a mysterious figure who led him through three days of relentless blizzards. The figure always walked twenty yards ahead of him always on his left, and never once spoke to him. On the morning that Pearson reached McMurdo Sound, the figure disappeared.”
As he watched, Jerry became aware of a faint disturbance in the air, as if the door had been opened, even though it hadn’t. He also had the unaccountable feeling that he wasn’t alone anymore. He pressed the mute button on the TV remote and listened, frowning. On the screen, in utter silence, he saw Clement Pearson’s charcoal sketch of the figure that was supposed to have saved him from freezing to death. Tall and hunched, a dark blur seen only through a teeming blizzard.
While he listened, and watched, the figure on the screen appeared to swell and distort, as if Clement Pearson’s sketch were actually moving. Then the window next to the television rippled and distorted, too. Jerry felt as if he were seeing his room through languidly wallowing water.
He blinked, trying to clear his vision. He was still on antibiotics and painkillers, and he expected that this was one of the side effects. Yet the flowers beside his bed suddenly melted and flowed, and he felt sure that there was somebody standing very close to him, only inches away. He could even hear breathing—tight, suppressed breathing—and another sound, which he couldn’t identify. It was a thick, unpleasant rustling noise. It reminded him of the swarm of cockroaches that he had discovered when he was seven, rushing in their hundreds through the crawl space of his parents’ old house. And had screaming nightmares about, for years afterward.
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