by Dana Donovan
“How the hell did she manifest her will on Karen and the others?”
“Right. They didn’t all have a spirited charm around their necks.”
“No, but what is a charm? She could have cast a spell on anything and then made sure her victims received it, anonymously or otherwise.”
On that point, Carlos agreed, but by then I had all but talked myself out of blaming Lilith again. I was about to suggest we head back to the box, when I noticed something strange about Leona’s apartment. Carlos saw me looking and trained his eyes that way.
“What’s wrong?”
I pointed. “That’s Leona’s kitchen window, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“The light’s off.”
He hemmed a little. “So?”
“Didn’t she say she planned on making something to eat before turning in for the night?”
“Yes.”
“So, why isn’t she in there cooking?”
Carlos checked his watch. “It’s getting late. Maybe she changed her mind.”
I shook my head. “No. Do you change your mind about eating when you’re hungry?”
That hit home. He shut the car door and started toward the stairs. “We better check on her,” he said. “You with me?”
“With you?” I pushed him aside as he came around the fender. “I’m all over you, pal.”
We trampled up the steps and began beating on the door. When she didn’t answer within the first ten seconds, I gave Carlos permission to break it down.
“Me?” he said, his eyes batting.
“Yes. You.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“You’re younger.”
“We’ll do it together.”
“Fine.”
On the count of three we broke it in, but not without Carlos and me tumbling to the floor like a couple of wet sacks. I got up onto my elbows and saw Leona standing over me with a twelve-inch butcher knife. My first thought was that she wanted to stab me with it, but when I looked into her eyes I saw a wild, disconnect spirit. I knew then that she planned to plunge the blade into her own belly. Carlos rolled over on his back and realized right away what was happening. He grabbed Leona’s ankles and yanked her feet out from under her, spilling her to the floor on her butt.
“The knife!” I hollered. “Get the knife!” He reached for the blade, and as he did, she slashed at his hand and cut it open above the wrist. Carlos pulled his hand back. Leona’s knife came around a second time, missing his forearm by only inches. She dug at him again, and he rolled off to his left, just out of reach.
“Leona!” I cried, diverting her attention for a critical moment. I lunged forward, landing on top of her and knocking her flat on her back. Her hand came up over her head, exposing the blade to the gleam of the living room lights. I grabbed her wrist and forced it against the carpet, squeezing as hard as I could to get her to drop it. She screamed, and for a second, I wanted to let her go for fear of hurting her. Carlos, perhaps reading my mind, shouted for me to hold on. He came up from behind us on his knees and successfully wrestled the knife from her hand. At that moment, I grabbed the ring from the chain at her neck and I pulled it free with a quick, clean jerk.
“No!” I heard someone cry, but it came from neither Carlos nor Leona. At once, a mantle of grayish fog engulfed us around the floor. It hissed and swirled like a swarm of bees and then rose in a vertical column. I looked at Leona. Her eyes grew wide below arched brows. That untamed spirit I’d seen in her just moments before had gone. I rolled off her and sat up, and then Carlos helped us both to our feet.
“What is that, Tony?” he asked, pointing at the cloud, which had since taken on a nearly human form. It swirled and meandered lazily around the room, confused, if that was possible, and bumping into things, though not affecting their physical dispositions at all. “Is that Benjamin?”
“No,” said Leona, and she seemed sure about it. “Benjamin has not so much hate in him.”
“Then who?”
“It’s Crazy Eddy,” I said, as certain as Leona.
With that, the vaporous apparition condensed to an almost solidified state, manifesting in portions undisputedly recognizable as Mallory Edwards. It looked around the room and seemed to grow cognizant of its surroundings, even as it grew more defined in physiological properties. There came a moment when the form, which we had come to accept as the life force of Mallory Edwards, seemed to recognize Leona again. It swelled in size like a sinister cloud, morphing into shapes as grotesque as the mind could envision. I looked to Carlos and Leona, whose eyes scudded and pierced the shadowed specter as differently as any two people could. I believed then that we were all interrupting the experience in our own way and undoubtedly witnessing the phenomena from unique perspectives. It appeared as though its control on our psyche, though diluted, remained intact and continued to strengthen, influencing our perception and our ability to react decisively. In the back of my mind, I could see Karen Webber and the others, their cognitive process hijacked and compromised, unable to override the dominance that Mallory held over them. I imagined that they likely knew and understood what their psychical bodies were doing, killing themselves, as their mental control lay hostage to the fiendish resolve of its captor.
I set my sight upon the life force once more and noticed it moving toward Leona. Its energy seemed stronger now, intensifying in color and size, its swirling mass blistering with spikes and snapping with angry electric jabs. Leona stood motionless, and beside her, Carlos, both captivated by its hypnotic grasp. I stepped forward, toward the cloud, hoping to disrupt its flow. But a sudden force pushed me back into the wall like a cannon blast. The next thing I knew, Leona’s apartment descended into chaos. The burst of energy expelled from the mass erupted in a virtual cyclone and ripped through the room, tossing furniture about us like plastic toys.
It was then I looked down and felt Leona’s ring burning a hole in the palm of my hand. Remembering the incident with the witch’s ladder in the woods the year before, I took the ring and pitched it as hard as I could into the heart of the swirling black mass. The cloud swallowed the ring, allowing it to pass, yet it never hit the wall on the other side. At that moment, the room ignited in a flash as bright as lightning. A sound like crackling fire popped and hissed and screeched until we thought our eardrums would burst. Then, in an instant, it was gone. The room fell calm. I looked at Carlos and Leona. Their hair stood on twisted ends. The expression on their faces told me they hadn’t a clue as to what just happened. Processing the moment, I don’t think I had much of a clue myself. I hurried to Leona, grabbing her arms high near her shoulders.
“Are you okay?”
Her eyes melted into mine, and I knew then she was all right. She started to smile, but waited, as if maybe it were not yet okay to do so. Then a tickle from inside her seemed to coax a giggle from her lips and she smiled wide and bright. “Sí, Detective, I am fine.”
I turner to Carlos. “You?”
“Never better,” he said, and he twitched as if jolted by a residue electrical shock.
My heart jumped. “What was that?”
He smiled his boyish grin. “Just kidding.” He pointed to a white spot on the carpet by the door. “Is that Mallory?”
I walked over to the spot, got down on one knee and felt the carpet. I don’t know what I expected, but I definitely didn’t expect it to feel so hot. I pulled my hand away sharply, and looking back at Carlos I said, “It’s like molten lava.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” I turned to Leona. “Do you?”
She backed away slowly, her fingertips steepled below her chin. “Sí. It is El diablo. He has taken her away.”
“The devil?”
“Sí. The devil.” She leaned over and stole a glimpse behind me. Carlos and I turned around to see what caught her eye. The full moon shone bright outside her window, and from that vantage its light cast down directly on the spot that Mallory’s s
pirit form left on the carpet. I considered it a coincidence, but then remembered Lilith’s words when she said to me once that coincidence was just another way of explaining the unexplainable. How true, I thought.
I took out my phone and called Spinelli. He seemed distracted upon answering, and I got the feeling he was no longer at the justice center. I heard noises in the background, people talking and lots of static. He would say something to me, stop in mid-sentence and then finish it only after obvious interruptions. I was about to hang up on him, when he came back and filled me in on the news.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “You just simply won’t believe it, Detective.”
“I might,” I said, “if you tell me. Where the hell are you, and what’s going on there?”
“I’m at Rivera’s house with about twenty other cops and some ambulances. It’s nuts here! Rivera is dead. Piakowski is dead!”
“What!” I held the phone away from my ear and put it on speaker so that Carlos could hear.
“Yes! I came here to watch the place like you asked me to…”
“I didn’t ask you to go there,” I said. “I told you to send someone.”
“I got bored.”
I looked at Carlos and shook my head. “He’s your boy, Carlos.” Carlos only shrugged. “Spinelli, what happened?”
“No, take it outside,” he said, his voice distant. I assumed he was speaking to one of the cops on the scene again. He came back on the phone louder than before and slightly out of breath. “Okay, right after I got here, I mean like two seconds later, I heard two men arguing. It was Rivera and Piakowski. From outside the window, I heard one tell the other that he would kill him first before he ever let him tell Benjamin the truth. I figured that was Rivera talking, to which Piakowski replied, ‘Then give me forty thousand dollars and I’ll disappear for good.’”
“So, what happened?”
“He shot him!” said Spinelli. “Rivera pulled out a handgun and shot Piakowski dead!”
Carlos and I gasped. “You saw him do it?”
“Yes, through the window, and so I came around the house to the front door and broke in. I drew my weapon down on Rivera, identified myself as police and ordering him to stand down. He heard my order. I know he did, but he turned and took aim at me anyway. I had no choice, Tony. I had to….” His voice started breaking up, but I knew it wasn’t the connection. “I had to….” he said again, and then the phone went silent.
I looked at Carlos, who looked at me, and we both looked at Leona. She seemed uncertain about what happened at Rivera’s, but Carlos and I knew well, and we thought it better that Spinelli couldn’t finish what he tried to tell us. I pulled Carlos aside and instructed him to bring Leona to the station for debriefing. “Get her some coffee and something to eat,” I told him. “Then see if maybe officer Olson wouldn’t like to spend some time with her.”
“Brittany?”
“Yeah, she helped Leona a lot after we rescued her from—”
“Right. I remember,” he said, saving me from having to say it. “I’ll see if she’s available.”
“Thanks, and oh, you better send a unit to Mallory Edwards’ apartment. Send an ambulance, too, just in case.”
“You got it, Tony. In the meantime, what are you going to do? You going back to Rivera’s?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I have to take care of something first. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
“Sure.” He reached for my hand and shook it as if it were goodbye forever. I told him that wasn’t good enough, and I gave him a hug in case it was. Then I went to Leona and hugged her, too. She wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed me harder than I thought a girl her size could.
“Goodbye, Detective Marcella,” she said. Her eyes were glossy but her cheeks were still dry. “I will miss you much.”
“Ooh,” I said, and it came out jagged, as if stuck in my throat. “We’ll see each other again.” Though I knew I couldn’t say with certainty if and when. “In the meantime, you go with Detective Rodriquez. He’ll see to it that you get taken care of. He’ll get you anything you want.”
She rocked her head back and smiled up at me. “Will he get you if I ask him?”
I kissed her forehead and then left before my tears had time to show.
Fourteen
Carlos let me take the car without asking why I needed it, though I think inside he knew. For the last year I had yearned for a reason to return to New Castle, not to help him solve crimes, but to address an even bigger issue, one I couldn’t resolve unless I met it head on.
I pulled up in front of Lilith’s house and shut the motor off, and for a long time I sat there. I knew the pretext I would use to explain my presence if asked. I just wasn’t sure if I was ready to admit to myself that my need for mannered intervention is what drove me there to begin with. I thought of everything that happened since I closed the Surgeon Stalker case almost a year earlier. I thought about the uncertainties that plague nearly all my decisions, the insecurities, inadequacies, lack of satisfaction, the insomnia, mood swings, loss of appetite, feelings of remorse and regret, all of which follow brief but euphoric episodes of self-righteousness and false grandeur for a stellar career gone uncelebrated.
I almost turned the key and started the engine up again. The urge to drive away from there and keep on going seemed overwhelming. If not for the thought that I might just drive myself off the end of the pier at Suffolk’s Walk and drown a chilly death, then I might have done it. Instead, I let go of the key, got out of the car and walked up to Lilith’s door.
The night grew cooler and the moon higher in the starry sky. I took a deep breath, knocked on the door and waited for Lilith to answer. I didn’t think I would have to wait long. Somehow, I knew she expected me. When the door opened, I stepped inside. I didn’t say hello. I didn’t comment on the candles burning in little saucers and dishes throughout the house, and I didn’t even wipe my feet. I simply shut the door, took my coat off and sat down at the kitchen table. Lilith still had on her black robe, long cords of black beads still adorned her neck. She sat at the table across from me, her eyes like diamonds, shimmering in the candlelight, unblinking and cold.
“You have it?” she asked.
She knew I did. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the witch’s ladder that I had taken from Leona’s room the night we rescued her from Doctor Lowell’s basement prison. “Here.” I passed it across the table to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Say no more.” She took the beads and placed them around her neck. “Is she’s dead?”
“Mallory?” I said, but then realized I didn’t really have to ask her that. Lilith and I had made a connection: a connection we always had. “Yes, she’s dead. It happened a little while ago. I gathered some details from the chatter over the police radio on my way here. Spinelli sent a unit across town to check out her apartment. They found her body. The coroner will likely rule her death natural, heart attack or something, but….”
Lilith nodded, knowingly. I watched her play with the candle setting on the table, running her fingers over the flame slowly, but without burning herself. I took that as a metaphor of our relationship, realizing that the same would not hold true for me, should I decide to play with the fires she offered.
“The ring did it,” I said. “Didn’t it?”
Without looking up, she replied, “I told you it would work.”
“You never said it would kill her.”
“It wouldn’t have killed her if it wasn’t supposed to. The spell exercises only to the degree it must to work.”
“You should have told me.”
“Why? Would you have done anything differently?”
She knew I wouldn’t. To save Leona, I would have jumped out a window and landed on my head in the middle of the street. I watched Lilith pinch the candle’s flame and remove it from the wick. Still it burned with indifference between her fingers. “Tell me,” she said. “At what point did y
ou know that Mallory was the one co-possessing her victims through bilocation?”
“At what point did you know?” I returned.
She smiled, rolling the flame across her hand the way a magician rolls a silver dollar between his fingers. “Have you figured out why she did it?”
“Revenge,” I guessed. “It’s my thought she wanted to get back at everyone that ever teased Benny or made fun of him in Doctor Lowell’s workshops. She loved him, you know. I suppose, in her own twisted mind, it was the least she could do for him after molesting him.”
Her brow twitched. “So, the rumors were true?”
“You knew?”
“I heard things.”
“Lilith, then why didn’t you tell me about that earlier? It could have helped me in my investigation.”
She lifted her hand and blew on the flame percolating from her fingertips. It seemed to go out at first, but then ignited again like a trick candle on a birthday cake. She smiled at that, and I could not help but to smile, too.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know it as fact. I’m not one to perpetuate rumors.”
“Still….” I said, and I left it at that.
She looked up at me above the flame. “Why do you think she went after Leona?”
“Jealously. It’s the oldest motive in the book. Mallory knew that Benny liked Leona. She was the last thing standing in her way.”
“So, Ricardo is dead, too, yes?” That she asked me meant she already knew, although I couldn’t imagine how she figured that one out.
“Spinelli shot him.” I said. Funny, but it came out so easily. In a way, I guessed it made me feel like he had earned his rank in doing so. It didn’t make sense, though. I had been a detective fifteen years before I ever had to shoot a man, and Carlos never has. “It’s still too early to say for sure,” I told her. “But the working theory with the boys downtown is that Piakowski tried to extort hush money from Rivera to keep silent about Benjamin’s real relationship to Ricardo.”
