They were alone.
‘Hello, Jennifer,’ the man said.
‘What’s going on here? Who the hell are you?’
The man didn’t reply. After a full minute, he reached into his pocket, retrieving what Jennifer was certain would be the instrument of her death – gun, knife, straight razor, bludgeon. Instead, it turned out to be an instrument of her imminent madness.
A digital voice recorder.
The man pressed a button and placed the recorder on top of one of the fifty-gallon drums next to him. The recording began to play, a poem read by someone English. Jeremy Irons, Jennifer thought.
‘Got a question for you,’ the man said, still in shadow. ‘I want you to think back, now. Way back. I want you to recall a night about twenty years ago. Back when you were in college, Jenny. The others remembered.’
‘Others?’ Against her will, Jennifer’s voice had already begun to shake.
‘Yes. Friends of ours. Geoffrey Coldicott. Johnny Angelino.’
The names threw a cold shudder through Jennifer. The night came fluttering back, as it had so many times before. She remembered the Halloween party . . . the people in and out of dorm rooms . . . the heroin . . . Julia Raines. She remembered her hands on Julia’s hips, Julia’s breasts. As much as she fought them, tears began to well in Jennifer’s eyes.
‘Tell me what happened that night, Jenny. Tell me in your own words.’
‘I’m not going to tell you a goddamn thing,’ Jennifer said. ‘Take these cuffs off me.’
‘No.’
The poem continued in the background.
‘Effluence,’ the man said. ‘Is that what brought you back here, Jenny? The effluence of that young girl?’
‘Fuck you, motherfucker.’
The man laughed. ‘Speaking of family.’
The recorder, which had fallen silent, hissed and popped a few times. Then a new recording started. At first, to Jennifer, it sounded like someone was recording a memo on a train. The steady click-click-click of the tracks lulled her. Then she heard a familiar voice.
‘No . . . no . . . no . . .’came the recorder.
Jennifer was ten years old now, cowering in the corner after watching Greta break one of her mother’s figurines, waiting for the punishment. Whenever Greta broke something, which was very often, it was Jennifer who took the punishment.
It was her sister’s voice on the recording.
Jennifer heard the squeak of the bed, the pounding of the headboard against the wall. It wasn’t a train after all. Jennifer closed her eyes for a moment and saw the institutional steel headboard in her sister’s room, the Lalique figures rattling on the nightstand. The vitriol rose within her, hot and fluid.
‘Nooooo . . .’ Greta Schumann moaned. ‘Nooooo.’
‘Had to do a little computer work at your place today,’ the man said. ‘Your primary caregiver on duty wasn’t much of a challenge, I’m afraid.’
Jennifer exploded, the nausea falling away, liquidated by rage. ‘My sister! You cocksucker!’
‘You didn’t think about it twenty years ago, did you, Jenny?’ the man screamed, now just a few inches from her face. He seemed to have crossed the room in a single step. ‘Twenty years ago you didn’t care about family, did you? Julia and I were going to have children. Did you know that? Did you? Julia was going to experience motherhood and you stole it from her. You stole it from me, you cunt. Now I steal everything from you. Everything.’
He crossed the office, flipped on the overhead lights, and lifted the lid of the fifty-gallon can next to him. There, amid the dead-fall of arms and legs, bent at unnatural angles, Jennifer saw the sprig of graying hair, the skinny wrist bearing the cheap watch with the big numbers on the face. She also saw something dangling from her sister’s hand that looked as out of place as anything else this horror show had produced so far.
Her sister held a rosary.
Greta.
‘I have an idea,’ the man said brightly. And that’s when Jennifer knew exactly who stood before her. He removed a hypodermic needle from his coat pocket. ‘Let’s get high.’
Jennifer Schumann opened her mouth to scream. But it was too late.
Somewhere, she imagined as he wrapped a tourniquet around her arm, in the vicinity of twenty years too late.
41
IT HAD BEEN a toss-up whether to tell her about the gory details. He decided against it for the time being. Somehow, when he looked into her eyes, he couldn’t do it. The words bottlenecked in his throat and he found that, when real people were involved, when murder was involved, everything changed. Amelia St John was flesh and blood and she had a house and a car and a husband and a daughter, and everything he rehearsed on the way over (before he knew that she was the woman from his writing class) sort of dissipated like steam from a sidewalk grate when he looked into her eyes.
Although he still couldn’t find his notebook, he had remembered the name Roger St John from the e-mail list. Not that common a name. He had found it immediately in the directory. The other name, the last name on the list, wasn’t so clear. Schubert. Schunemann. Something like that.
He told Amelia that he was writing a story for the Chronicle and that three people on the list that came with the poem had died from an overdose of heroin, and that the police were investigating.
When they had kissed that night in the school’s parking lot, he had, of course, noticed the ring – and he sure as hell had no intention of dating a married woman – but she had been right there with her schnapps and soft lips and little black dress and—
She was married.
After Nicky’s initial nervous spiel, Amelia had told him about her efforts to decode the e-mail message, about the young men at Cybernauts, how the whole process had been kind of an obsession with her.
Every so often, as they sat on opposing love seats, realizing how they had been pursuing the same thing, Nicholas Stella and Amelia St John shook their heads in blank wonderment.
Amelia made a few phone calls, one to her husband’s voice mail, one to Karen MacGregor’s house. Within a few minutes, headlights washed the front windows of the house as Karen pulled up in her station wagon and Maddie got out.
Up the steps, through the door, in the house, safe.
Amelia dead-bolted the door as Maddie wandered into the living room, dropped her jacket on the couch, and walked over to where Nicky sat.
‘Hi,’ Maddie said.
‘Hi,’ Nicky replied.
The two studied each other for a few moments. Maddie twirled a curl with an index finger; Nicky smoothed his hair, fixed the collar of his shirt. Finally: ‘My name’s Nicky.’ He extended his hand.
‘My name’s Madeleine. Everybody calls me Maddie, though.’
They shook hands. Nicky was more than a little charmed by the girl’s forthright, businesslike manner. She had her mother’s green eyes, eyes for which Italian men have tumbled for centuries. Meg’s eyes. ‘Can I call you Maddie?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Maddie said. ‘It’s okay. Are you a friend of my dad’s?’
Nicky glanced at Amelia, who suddenly got interested in arranging the magazines on the coffee table. ‘Uh, well, no,’ Nicky said. ‘Not yet. I’m more a friend of your mom’s. I’m in her writing class.’
Maddie wrinkled her nose. ‘You don’t write romance books, do you?’
Nicky laughed. ‘What’s wrong with romance books?’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ Maddie said.
‘I write all kinds of stuff.’
‘Do you like dogs?’
‘Yes. I like dogs a lot, in fact,’ Nicky said, glancing at the huge golden retriever that was napping under the dining room table.
‘That’s Molson,’ Maddie added. ‘He runs from hummingbirds.’
‘Oh, he’ll toughen up,’ Nicky said. ‘He looks like a big puppy to me.’
‘Maddie, it’s time for bed,’ Amelia said. ‘Go get ready, hon.’
‘’Kay,’ Maddie said, heading for the s
tairs. When she got to the foot of the steps, she turned and added, ‘’Bye, Nicky.’
‘’Bye, Maddie. Sleep good.’
Maddie raced up the stairs.
‘She’s a doll,’ Nicky said.
‘Thanks,’ Amelia said. She sat down on the love seat, across from Nicky, then immediately sprang back up. ‘My husband should’ve called back by now.’
Amelia crossed the room, picked up the phone, replaced it.
‘I’m sure he’ll call soon. I’m sure everything’s okay,’ Nicky said, rising to his feet. He edged toward the front door. ‘I really didn’t mean to freak you out.’
‘It’s okay,’ Amelia said. She walked Nicky to the front door, tried to strike a casual pose against the jamb. She failed. ‘We’ll be okay.’
‘Before I leave, though, I need a favor,’ Nicky said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Does your husband have any yearbooks from Case Western Reserve?’
‘I think so,’ Amelia said. ‘Let me look.’ She returned in a few moments.
‘This is the only year he has,’ she said, holding up an embossed 1987 CWRU yearbook. ‘But there’s two of them for some reason.’
‘Would it be okay if I borrowed it?’
‘Sure,’ Amelia said, handing it to him. ‘But why do you need it?’
‘Background.’ Nicky said. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Nicky was halfway through the door. He turned, studied her for a moment, and said, ‘About the other night.’
‘Yeah?’ Amelia said. She felt she might be nervous if the subject came up. She was right. ‘What about it?’
‘I realize now that it isn’t going to happen, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘But I just want you to know that, at least for a few days, thinking that it might happen was, well, really wonderful.’ Nicky stepped onto the porch.
Amelia began to color, fought it. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’ll be okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Amelia said. ‘But what about you? You going to tell me what happened to your face?’
‘Little disagreement over a past-due account,’ Nicky said. He reached out, touched her hand gently. When she turned her hand over, he placed his business card in it. ‘If you need anything, or if you want to talk about this, call me. Okay?’
Amelia nodded.
A minute later, as Nicky turned onto Falls Road, a dark blue van made the turn behind him, then kept a safe distance as the two vehicles headed north, into the darkness of the MetroPark.
42
HE COULDN’T STOP thinking about her. Amelia. He even liked her name. Sounded so . . . Jane Austen or something.
Nicky stood in his boxer shorts, looked out the front window of his apartment, through the small Palladian window right under the peak of the gable, and pondered the very strange scenario that was his life of late. In the past few days he had been punched out, threatened with a gun, suspected – albeit briefly – of the murder of a Chinese drug dealer. And he’d gotten a crush on a married woman whose husband was involved in a bizarre murder plot that seemed to stretch back twenty years, to the Case Western Reserve University campus of 1988, a plot that somehow included his cousin Joseph’s old friend Johnny Angel.
The strange, frightening part of it all, Nicky thought, was that the one thing that seemed to be at the center of it all, the one cog in the wheel that allowed this bizarre juggernaut to roll, was him.
Okay. How had he come to join the writer’s class where he met Amelia? When had he started getting those flyers for the class out in Collier Falls? Hadn’t he got a dozen or so in just a few months? Had somebody wanted him to join the class?
Nicky walked over to the TV, grabbed the remote, flipped it on, fell into his big recliner. He cruised the channels: exercise equipment, Anthony Bourdain, a southern preacher asking for money, Al Sharpton bitching about something, more exercise equipment, C-SPAN. He stopped at a local station. It was a news wrap-up.
‘. . . of our top stories. Once again, NewsFinder Five has learned that the FBI may have uncovered new evidence in the recent death of Father John Angelino of the St Francis of Assisi parish on the city’s east side. You’ll recall that Father Angelino’s body was found in an apartment on Cedar Road, apparently the victim of an accidental heroin overdose, but police have since learned that there may have been foul play. Although FBI spokesmen would neither confirm or deny it, our sources tell us that they are now treating it as a homicide, and that this may not be an isolated incident. Stay tuned to Channel Five for more details as they develop . . .’
Nicky sprinted to the phone and put in a call to Kral, who was out. He left a message with the desk sergeant.
As he took off his shorts and started the shower, he found that he was shaking a bit. He was on the cutting edge of one of the biggest stories of the year. This could easily make the national magazines. Even a movie of the week. He had an in with the cops. He had an in with Amelia. Which he hoped would mean an in with her husband.
And the answer, he thought as he stepped into the hot, pulsating stream of water, was in that yearbook.
It had to be.
After his shower he dried himself, checked his messages, slipped into black sweatpants and sweatshirt. He sat at his desk, opened the CWRU yearbook, and was instantly dragged down a long corridor of memory, courtesy of the hairstyles, the clothing, the outlandish fads of the era. He riffled some more pages and came to a page devoted to something called Poetica ’88. It appeared to be a poetry festival that was held in Clark Hall, the building that housed the English Department. The photograph showed a group of maybe twenty students, standing on the steps of the building, loosely posed for the photograph. Nicky immediately recognized the tall, bony student in front, the guy with the barber-college haircut and protruding ears. It was Geoffrey Coldicott. His mind flashed on the skinless death mask he had seen in Geoffrey’s apartment. Next to Geoffrey – in fact, with his arm on Geoffrey’s shoulder – was John Angelino.
Nicky searched the sea of faces, looking for somebody, something. His eyes were soon drawn to the back row where he saw a dark-haired young man leaning against a sandstone pillar, smiling, his arm very tentatively around a beautiful young woman. Nicky thought he looked a little familiar, but couldn’t place him. Was it Benjamin Crane? He flipped through the seniors and found Crane, confirming the fact that he was not the man by the pillar.
Nicky was just about to give up when he spotted the young man from the steps. Page 154, lower right. G. Daniel Woltz. G. Daniel was slender, had dark eyes, dark hair swept over his forehead in the standard collegiate cut.
Nicky moved on, flipping the pages into the freshman section, and saw the young woman around whom G. Daniel had his arm; a beautiful girl who caught Nicky’s breath for a moment. Julia Ann Raines was her name. Soft hair, delicate features, innocent eyes. What struck him most, what drew his eye to the photo to begin with, besides the girl’s beauty, was the fact that Julia Ann Raines had signed her small picture in the freshman section. Beneath her photo, in a tiny but well-calligraphed hand, she had written a poem.
Nicky recognized it. T.S. Eliot.
He had an Eliot anthology somewhere, he’d have to find it. He then tried to remember the e-mail addresses from the stick. He could only recall one, probably because it just didn’t seem to fit the man. Geoffrey Coldicott: [email protected].
Nicky got online. After checking his e-mail and finding nothing, he opened his UseNet program. UseNet was the Internet’s version of a worldwide collection of bulletin boards, with thousands of boards devoted to every imaginable subject. Most were rather benign, pruriently speaking, but with the advent of digitized graphics, it didn’t take the Net long to discover that one could post photographs and illustrations that could be downloaded and viewed on computers worldwide.
He started a keyword search of [email protected] and hit Enter. Theoretically, if Geoffrey Coldicott had recently posted something to a news
group, under his own name, this search should yield the whereabouts of those files. Nicky knew it was a long shot, but within seconds, the search found something.
As he looked at the screen, Nicky’s heart stammered. He had to read it three times before it would sink in.
There was an upload from Geoffrey Coldicott.
The address of the uploader was [email protected], and it was cross-posted to a few groups: alt.sex.male, alt.-binaries.exhibitionism, alt. binaries.voyeurism. Nicky looked at the time of the upload. Five thirty-four p.m. on the day of Geoffrey’s murder.
The file was uploaded at the moment of Geoffrey Coldicott’s death.
As he downloaded the photographs of Geoffrey Coldicott, as the graphics revealed themselves on his screen, slowly, from top to bottom, Nicky found that he was holding his breath. He could see that it was a number of pictures, a series of color shots arranged like a contact sheet. The five photographs were all of Geoffrey Coldicott sitting in a chair, his dinette chair – the chair Nicky had just occupied himself while being questioned by the cops. The main difference, of course, was that Geoffrey was naked. He remembered seeing Geoffrey’s face, briefly, through the storefront at the Arcade, but now his face was a tortured canvas of pain and humiliation.
The person who had taken these pictures was probably the person who had killed him, Nicky thought.
And that person, Nicky could see as he looked a little more closely at one of the photos, the one in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, was reflected in the mirror over Geoffrey’s mantel.
Nicky enlarged the section of the photograph that held the mirror, found that he was right. You could clearly see that it was a man, and that he was taking Geoffrey’s picture. He hit the Enter button again and doubled the size of the enlargement. Now he could see more of the man’s face and shoulders. The man had dark hair and wore a gold watch. But beyond that, he couldn’t make out much.
He closed his laptop, grabbed the yearbook and his keys, and headed for the back steps. On the way he stopped at his bookshelf and found the T.S. Eliot anthology, brought that, too.
The Violet Hour Page 18
