East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

“How you walked away?” she said.

  “No,” Tommy said. “After that. I went to Dwight Sykes’s funeral in Oakland. His mom and dad invited me to their home afterward. I was afraid they’d hate me, but they told me they knew it was an accident. That I was just playing the game as hard as I could, which was the same way Dwight played. But his mother said, ‘Tommy Gunderson, I want you to do good. Because Dwight wanted to do good things with his life. So now you have to do all the good things he would have done.’ I wasn’t sure what that meant, but now I think this is what it meant. This is why I was the one who got up and walked away. Because I was meant to do this. I know it was the right thing to do. Amos was going to hurt you. He was evil. I don’t know how you feel about evil, but that’s the way I saw it.”

  “For the record,” Dani said, “I’m totally against evil.”

  “Great minds think alike,” Tommy said. “You don’t feel so bad when you know you did the right thing.”

  Dani sipped her shake.

  “In a way, I don’t think of Amos as evil,” she said. “I mean, he became evil. He chose evil. He allowed evil in. After the things I saw in Africa, I started really questioning the things I’d been taught about faith. But the Amos you … stopped was evil. I know that. I guess I can’t help thinking about who Amos was before he turned evil. The evil that was done to him. I think about the scared little boy in Russia, running from his father …”

  “I know,” Tommy said.

  “Did you know,” Dani said, “there was a second syringe in his kit? The first one had the same cocktail he gave Julie. The second one was full of pentobarbital.”

  “Isn’t that what they use to euthanize pets?”

  “Yup.”

  “Maybe that’s what he was going to use to kill you,” Tommy suggested.

  “Instead of the meat cleaver?” she asked.

  “Then why—”

  “To kill himself,” Dani said. “He was on a suicide mission. He wasn’t trying to hide his fingerprints or cover his tracks with a fake surveillance video. He knew he wasn’t going to get away with it. Pentobarbital is fast-acting. Almost instantaneous. He must have figured he had one last thing to do and then he was going to take himself out.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Tommy said. “Case closed, right?”

  “Is it?” Dani asked.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a part that just doesn’t fit. Why was Julie Leonard chosen to be the victim? It wasn’t just because she was available. When serial killers choose victims, it’s almost never entirely random. They may be sitting on a park bench, waiting for someone to come along, but they’re not waiting for just anybody to come along. They’re waiting for the first person who fits their fantasy. If the mother who abused them was a redhead and wore a blue hat, they’re waiting for the first redhead wearing a blue hat to walk by to trigger them, even if they don’t consciously know that’s what they’re waiting for. So how did Julie fit Amos’s fantasy?”

  “I thought you said she reminded him of his mother,” Tommy said.

  “I was wrong. Julie was a peer,” Dani said. “If Amos was looking for mother figures, he would have fixated on older women. The other pieces of the puzzle fit together perfectly. Here’s the crime, here’s who did it, here’s the story about his poor life in an orphanage that explains it, case closed, wrapped up in a bow. But why did he pick Julie? I can’t quite see the logic.”

  “Maybe looking for a logical answer is looking in the wrong place,” Tommy said.

  “What are you saying?” Dani asked. “You’re still thinking it has something to do with the death of the firstborn?”

  “Maybe,” Tommy said. “But I was also thinking—what do we know about Julie? What’s unusual about her? Or illogical?”

  “Her medical history,” Dani said. “Or lack thereof. What are you getting at?”

  “It’s just too odd not to mean something,” Tommy said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a 900-pound gorilla sitting in the booth with us. The dreams. The signs. You’re looking for logical answers—”

  “Tommy,” Dani said. “That’s what psychiatrists do. That’s what doctors do. Cause and effect. You assess the situation, note the symptoms, perform the tests you think are necessary, eliminate what you can, make a diagnosis, and arrive at a logical treatment.”

  “But what if the answer is beyond logical?” Tommy asked her. “When have logical answers ever explained things that are paranormal or supernatural? They can’t. By definition. This isn’t logical. What qualifies as supernatural about this case?”

  “Amos’s psychic abilities?”

  “Possibly,” Tommy said. “But that could just be cheap parlor tricks. Set that aside. What else?”

  “Willis Danes,” Dani said.

  “What about Willis Danes?”

  “I can’t tell you without violating doctor-patient confidentiality. But trust me.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “What else?”

  “The deer in the wires?”

  “The deer in the wires was just a deer in the wires,” Tommy said. “Think.”

  “Abbie Gardener,” Dani said.

  “Abbie’s elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor anymore,” Tommy said. “I’m not even sure it can get out of the basement. But suppose for a second she wasn’t raving. What was she trying to warn us about?”

  “Satan?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said. “So let’s assume for one second that Abigail Gardener isn’t completely off her rocker. What’s Satan’s chief distinguishing characteristic? Satan, the great … ?”

  “Deceiver,” Dani said.

  “Right,” Tommy said. “And it’s not like he’s some Las Vegas lounge magician pulling quarters out of people’s ears. He’s not in it just to fool people. He wants to destroy God’s work. To destroy souls. To destroy everything. God gives us free will, but Satan actively tricks and lies and manipulates. He wants us to destroy ourselves. So suppose we’ve been deceived by the master of all deceivers, who wants us to destroy ourselves. We think the case is closed. Amos did it. Here’s how he did it. Here’s why he did it. Pretty convincing, don’t you think?”

  “Amos didn’t do it?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “He did it. But he didn’t do it alone.”

  “The evidence says no one was with him,” Dani reminded him.

  “No one was there,” Tommy said. “But somebody was guiding him. While you were in Maryland, I read the deposition you gave Phil. You said, ‘Amos, you don’t have to do this.’ And his reply was what?”

  “ ‘You can’t stop what’s going to happen.’ ”

  “Like he didn’t have a choice,” Tommy said. “Why kill you? Why bother? He wasn’t mad at you. It wasn’t going to change anything. Why did he go to your house? Why not just run?”

  “He didn’t want to run,” Dani said.

  “I think he thought he had to kill you because he’d be in big trouble if he didn’t,” Tommy said. “Like someone ordered him to do it. Someone sent him. So who sent him? The same person who sent him to kill Julie. So we have two questions. Who sent him, and why Julie? And he killed Julie, but it wasn’t for any reason of his own. It was somebody else’s reason. Which opens up the range of possibilities.”

  “By the way,” Dani told him, “I thought about Julie’s lack of a medical history. I searched my father’s medical records when I got home. Kara was his patient too. Same story. Normal checkups, but no office visits. The odds of having two kids with perfect health have to be astronomical. And it wasn’t because her mom couldn’t afford insurance. She had full coverage.”

  “So why kill someone who never gets sick?” Tommy asked. “Maybe Julie has some kind of genetic … thingy?”

  “Genetic thingy?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” Dani said. “Do you think she’s some sort of genetic carrier for a disease?
Why kill somebody for that?”

  “I didn’t say it made sense,” Tommy said. “Yet.”

  “Yet,” Dani said.

  “Here’s something else that doesn’t make sense,” Tommy said, taking an SD card from his pocket. He found his briefcase on the floor where he’d put it, took out his laptop, turned it on, and once it had booted, popped the SD card into the card reader. When his media player appeared, he played the file he’d saved from his security program.

  “This is from the night you stayed at my house, two seconds in real time.”

  He clicked Play.

  “At regular speed, you can’t see anything. Now watch when I slow it down four times.”

  He clicked Play again.

  “See that flicker? Okay, here’s the same two-second interval, slowed down thirty times normal speed.” He clicked Play and narrated, pointing at the screen with his finger. “Watch here. If something registers heat, you see a signature ranging from green to yellow to orange to red. But this— this shape here ranges from blue to ultraviolet, almost like a hole in the image. Now watch. Just after 2:13 in the morning, it enters the house, right through the wall …”

  Dani gasped, placing a hand on her chest.

  “And then nine-tenths of a second later,” Tommy said, “it exits. You said you were the kind of person who needed scientific proof. There you have some. I don’t know what it means, but feel free to have that analyzed by whoever you think could do it right.”

  He popped the SD card out and handed it to her. “That’s yours. I have copies.”

  “That’s terrifying,” she said.

  “What is it?” Tommy asked, sensing there was something more that she wasn’t telling him.

  “I had another dream,” she said. “When I was in Maryland. Wanna hear it?”

  “Only if you wanna tell it.”

  “I was at the top of a cliff, climbing around on the rocks with my parents,” Dani said. “And far below, way, way down, there was a pool of clear blue water, and my parents said, ‘Oh look—that looks like fun,’ and then they dived before I could stop them. I was terrified, certain the fall would kill them. I watched them splash, and then I saw them climb out onto a sunny rock. I felt so relieved. Then they smiled and waved to me and wanted me to follow them. But I couldn’t jump because I was afraid. I was frozen. And then they were gone.”

  “Then what happened?” Tommy said.

  “Then I dreamed of an angel.” She thought of the figurine Willis Danes had made for her.

  “Did the angel say anything?” Tommy asked her.

  “He said, ‘Go ahead and jump—I’m here to catch you if you need me.’”

  “Did you jump?”

  “I did,” Dani said. “But that’s where I can’t remember anything more. I don’t know if that was the end of the dream, but that’s all I could remember. So what do you think it means? You be the psychiatrist.”

  “I don’t think the answer is psychological,” Tommy said. “It’s theological. You need to make a leap. Of faith. And there’s a risk. That’s what jumping off a cliff meant. You have to take your logical, rational, scientific self and set it aside and do something entirely counterintuitive. And you’re going to be all right, but you have to follow where this goes.”

  “Okay,” Dani said.

  “Was the angel in your dream dressed like a biker? With tattoos and a jean jacket vest?”

  Dani was too startled to say anything in reply and could only nod.

  “I met him,” Tommy said. “The night Abbie first wandered into my yard.”

  “Tommy—we can’t tell anyone. If we tell Irene or Phil, they’re going to think … They’d tell me I need a psychiatrist.”

  “I think I know what needing a psychiatrist feels like,” Tommy said, taking her hand and squeezing it. She squeezed back.

  “His name is Charlie, by the way,” Dani said.

  “Charlie?” Tommy said. “Okay. Charlie it is.”

  “That’s exactly what I said.”

  “What do we do first?” Tommy asked.

  “Well,” Dani said. “I don’t know. I feel like my medical training isn’t going to be of much use.”

  “No,” Tommy said. “Stop right there. You have a lot of gifts and talents. God wants you to use them all. If I may speak on his behalf, this is something I know. Something I’ve said to athletes who question themselves. God wants you to be you. So strictly as a forensic psychiatrist, what do you want to do next?”

  “I was thinking I want to see Julie’s body.”

  “Let’s start there,” Tommy said.

  Dani dialed a number on her BlackBerry. Tommy listened to her half of the conversation as she spoke with the medical examiner, and heard enough to know it was bad news.

  “Julie’s body was cremated three days ago,” she reported. “He has tissue samples preserved as evidence, but that’s it. Amos’s body went out this morning. It’s at the Whitney Funeral Home. He’s not sure if it’s cremated already or not. It depends on how backed up they are.”

  “If we hurry, we might be able to catch it,” Tommy said. “My car or yours?”

  44.

  Tommy drove, slinging the sleek green Jaguar around the corners on the wet roads strewn with leaves. Dani dialed the funeral home on the way but got an automated voice message informing her that the mortuary was closed and to call back during normal business hours. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find, but she decided to trust her instincts.

  At the mortuary, Tommy parked in the rear, explaining to Dani that in high school, working for his father, he’d made countless flower deliveries to the loading dock. The crematorium was in the basement, down a flight of stairs next to the dock.

  Through the thick steel door, Dani heard loud rock-and-roll music. Tommy rapped on the door with a flat hand. Finally a man in his late twenties answered.

  “Is Gerry here?” Tommy shouted over the music. “I tried to call, but you must not have heard the phone.”

  “Wait a sec,” the man shouted. He stepped into the office and turned the music off.

  Dani heard only a steady muffled roar. It was hot inside the crematorium.

  “Sorry,” the man said, offering Tommy his hand. “I’m Dennis. I have to turn the music way up because the furnaces are pretty loud and we had ’em both cooking tonight. How can I help you?”

  Dani explained who she was and who Tommy was, and that she was with the district attorney’s office, and told the mortician’s assistant that she wanted to see the body of Amos Kasden. Dennis asked her to wait a moment and went back to the office to check a list on his clipboard. When he returned, he shrugged apologetically.

  “Sorry,” he said. “He’s cooling down in number two. I was just about to rake him in.”

  “Can we see the remains anyway?” Dani said.

  “Sure,” Dennis said, a puzzled expression on his face. “But there’s really not much to see. Can I ask why?”

  “We’re not sure why,” Dani told him.

  “We just want to be sure,” Tommy said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good enough for me.”

  He led them down the hall and opened the door to the crematorium. It was even hotter there. Dani saw a pair of ovens into which bodies could be conveyed via racks of steel rollers. She could hear the gas jets roaring in oven number one. Oven number two was quiet. Exhaust hoods above the ovens vented the fumes.

  Dennis explained the process. He’d leave the body in the fire for an hour, slide out the tray holding the body, stir the pieces around to make sure everything was burning evenly, break the larger chunks into smaller pieces, and then slide the tray and the body back in for another hour at 5,000 degrees. Once the ashes cooled, he’d rake what was left into metal bins marked with the name and identification number of the deceased, and then he’d fill the urns provided by the funeral home or by the family.

  Dennis donned a pair of thick asbestos gloves, opened the door to furnace number two, and withdrew the tray co
ntaining the ashes of Amos Kasden.

  “Well, that’s odd,” he said.

  He stepped aside so that Dani could see.

  In the middle of the tray, as if someone had drawn in the ashes with a finger, Dani saw a familiar symbol:

  45.

  Tommy drove Dani home, neither of them saying much. When she opened the door to her kitchen, Arlo came running to her and meowed happily, weaving between her legs. She picked him up and stroked his fur, then set him down. She surveyed the kitchen.

  “They did a good job cleaning,” she said. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” Tommy said. “We can shop for a new kitchen table tomorrow. It’s on me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Is that what we do? Just go about our business as if nothing’s changed?”

  “For now,” Tommy said. “Get some sleep and we can regroup in the morning. And pray for guidance in the meantime. That’s my plan, anyway.”

  “Sounds like a good one,” Dani said. “See you tomorrow.”

  But her eyes said she didn’t want him to leave.

  He crossed the kitchen floor, took her face in his hands, and kissed her gently. She kissed him back.

  He broke it off. “I’ve wanted to do that for a very long time,” he said, gazing into her eyes. “I’m going home now, but I want to tell you something. I know you’re scared. I can’t say there’s nothing to be afraid of. But wherever this is going—I’m with you. We’re in this together. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He drove through town, past the diner and The Pub, both closed now, and headed out Gardener Street to where it met Atticus Road. The rain had stopped. Moonlight shone down through the spaces between the clouds to dapple the landscape with its impartial light. It was cold enough that Tommy guessed there would be ground frost in the morning. He turned left past the country club and took the turn on Keeler Street to Bull’s Rock Hill. He parked at the end of the gravel road and walked the rest of the way to the top.

  There was no police tape, no evidence that anything evil had taken place here, just the sky and the moon and the lake below and the town asleep.

  “Put yourself in the victim’s shoes,” one of his criminology professors at John Jay College had advised. “Try to see what the victim might have seen. Feel what the victim felt.”