by Ninie Hammon
Daniel stared at the photos, and for a moment the images didn’t even register. They showed front and side views of a woman who’d been beaten up—badly. Her left eye was black—swollen completely shut—her lip was split and her nose appeared to be broken. The sleeve of her dress was ripped at the shoulder.
“Do you know this woman? Her name is Lily Saunders.”
Then it hit him. It was the woman from the elevator.
“Yes. I mean, no. I don’t know the woman, but I recognize her. I rode up in the elevator with her at the Centurion Hotel tonight. What happened to her?”
“We’re hoping you can tell us that,” said Bizanski. “So you admit being in the elevator with Miss Saunders at the Centurion?”
“I didn’t know her name was Lily Saunders. It’s not like she introduced herself, but yes.”
“She didn’t tell you her name when you spent half an hour in the bar with her before you got into the elevator?” Fowler asked.
Daniel was incredulous. “I wasn’t in the bar with her!”
“The parking lot stamp for your car says you arrived at the hotel an hour before you were scheduled to speak. Where were you?”
“I got a voice mail asking me to come early—”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know, there was no name and—”
“Can we hear it?”
“I didn’t save it.”
“Why were you to come early?”
“For a gathering…but I couldn’t find anybody…there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, so I sat in the lounge. I was not in the bar. I never saw that woman before I got into the elevator with her. But I certainly remember her. She was nuts!”
“How so?” Bizanski asked in a gentle tone. Yeah, Good Cop. Definitely Good Cop. “What did she do that was strange?”
“Everything she did was strange,” Daniel said. Then he told the officers what had happened in the elevator and in the hallway outside the elevator. It didn’t take long. There wasn’t a whole lot to tell. When he finished, the two officers were silent. They exchanged a look, Good Cop passing the ball back to Bad Cop.
“So you’re saying this was all her fault?” Bad Cop said. ““That she stopped the elevator, she grabbed you, she came on to you?”
The purposeful disbelief dripped off his words.
“She didn’t come on to me. She…like I said, what she did didn’t make sense. None of it.”
“Pull up your sleeves,” Bizanski said. “I want to see the top of your hands.”
The officer picked up his phone and took three shots of the scratch on Daniel’s right hand while Daniel tried to explain it.
“I had to threaten her to get her to give me the phone.” He saw their reaction and added, “Threaten to call security. So she handed it to me, then grabbed to get it back and scratched my hand.”
"How'd her underwear get in your pocket?"
"She must have put it there."
"Why would she do a thing like that?"
"I don't know--ask her!"
“And that’s your story?”
“It’s not a story. It’s the truth.”
“You do know, don’t you, that there are surveillance cameras in the elevator and the hallway?”
Daniel hadn’t noticed the cameras. Now, he let out a huge sigh and relaxed back into his chair. He saw that Good Cop noted his reaction. Bad Cop didn’t. “Then what am I doing here?” he demanded. “If you’ve seen the tape, you know I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s not what the surveillance videos show.”
Daniel was shocked into silence.
“That’s crazy…impossible.”
“Take a look for yourself,” Fowler said.
The detective punched a button on his laptop, typed something in, then turned the screen to face Daniel. He reached around the screen and clicked play on a video.
The picture was gray and grainy. The video was jumpy, so the movement you could see was jerky and halting—like every other surveillance camera image he’d ever seen on television. But it was clear that it was Daniel and the woman Fowler called Miss Saunders, alone in the elevator.
Daniel watched in mounting horror at what was obviously a perfectly choreographed dance, played out for an audience of one—the stationary security camera mounted in the front left corner of the elevator. It was perfectly staged so the movement that was within the range of the camera told a story that was nothing like the reality he’d lived for the few minutes he’d spent with Lily Saunders.
The woman greets Daniel with a welcoming smile as he gets on the elevator. The doors close, the elevator moves. Then it suddenly jerks to a stop. The row of control buttons on the front wall of the elevator is outside the range of the camera. The video shows the back of Daniel’s head because he’s turned to face the woman. She looks at him, facing the camera and appears both surprised and afraid. Then the woman is flung violently into the back wall of the elevator, with Daniel, filmed from the back, bent over her, holding on to her shoulders. He leans closer in an obvious effort to kiss her. She shakes her head vehemently no, shoves him away and lurches toward the front of the elevator, her hand out to disconnect the emergency stop button. Then she hurries back to the corner, turns away from him and hunches her shoulders as if she were trying to melt into the wall.
When the elevator stops, she hurries toward the door to get away. Though it’s out of the range of the elevator camera, it’s obvious Daniel tries to grab her because she sprawls out face-first on the floor in full view of the hallway camera. He gets out of the elevator, leans over her, and she backs up away from him until she hits the wall, totally terrified, shaking her head no.
Daniel advances toward her. She shakes her head no. He reaches down to grab her, but she scoots out of his grasp and makes a break for it down the hallway. Daniel follows her.
Then what is obviously another piece of the tape rolls, the time stamp later than the first one. In it, the woman runs back through the range of the hall camera and out the stairway door. Her face is turned away from the camera, but it is clear that the sleeve of her red blouse has been ripped. The last shot is of Daniel waiting for the elevator, straightening his tie and smoothing his hair.
Daniel stared unbelieving at the gray screen after the officer switched off the video, his mind reeling, so many thoughts racing through it he didn’t have time to stop and think any of them.
“Still say you didn’t do anything?” Bad Cop asked. “We’ve got forensics lifting prints off the snack room where you shoved her down beside the ice machine and raped her. You telling me they won’t find your prints there?”
“Of course, they’ll find my prints. She ran in there with my phone and slammed the door in my face. I went in after her.”
Bad Cop sneered. “It’s a shame you came prepared, used protection. A video and prints—the only thing we don’t have is a DNA sample.”
Reality dawned on Daniel laboriously, like lifting something heavy, and he couldn’t seem to find his voice for a few moments after that. But when he did it, was surprisingly level and clear—what Jack had called his “ministerial voice” when they were kids. Over the years, it had become the default.
“I’d like to talk to an attorney,” he said.
“Don’t bother,” Bad Cop said. “We don’t need to ask any more questions right now. You’ve told us everything we need to know.”
CHAPTER 7
1985
Becca held her breath as the demon-possessed boys approached her hiding place. Cold spread out in front of them, an arctic blast that made instant white plumes out of McDougal’s panting breath. She put a trembling finger to her lips to keep the dog quiet and felt each individual beat of her heart as it banged in her chest. The bush hid the two of them well, blocking them completely from sight. She told herself she was safe, the boys wouldn’t see her.
And they didn’t.
But they did smell her.
“Yuck,” said the boy nearest th
e bush when they passed. He pulled up short. “That smells like puke!”
Becca looked at the wet spot where she’d spewed out her breakfast. Why didn’t she think to cover it up with dirt? It was too late to do that now, though. She had to stay as still as a baby rabbit. Any movement would shake the limbs of the bush.
“Fresh puke,” said the boy next to him.
They all stopped running. She could see their feet as they stood together talking—arguing—no more than ten feet away.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“You got a nose? It’s gross.”
Shoes shuffled on the rocks as the boy who didn’t smell it apparently shoved the boy who did.
“Somebody’s been here.” Becca recognized the redheaded kid’s voice. “Look around.”
Then it was over in a matter of seconds. One of the boys crouched down, peered in and spotted her.
“What do we have here?” He stepped to the bush, parted the limbs and reached for her. She cringed away, but he snagged a hank of her hair and started to drag her out of the bush. McDougal didn’t bark or growl, just sunk his teeth into the boy’s arm above the wrist. The boy howled in pain, let go of Becca’s hair and fell backward, dragging the dog with him. He landed on his back, bellowing, and shook McDougal off with a violent motion that sent the sixty-pound dog flying through the air. He landed with a plop fifteen feet away. The boy leapt to his feet and lurched toward him.
“I’m gonna kill—”
McDougal bolted into the woods in the direction he and Becca had come.
The boy took two steps after the dog, but the redheaded kid grabbed his arm and gestured to Becca, still crouched among the bush’s branches.
“We got bigger fish to fry.”
The redhead reached in, grabbed her arm, dragged her out of the bush and flung her to the ground in front of them.
She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Her frantic thoughts scattered like the tiny white seeds of a dandelion puffball hit by a breeze.
We should have stayed together like we promised Bishop.
Run, DD, run!
I don’t want to die.
When she opened her eyes, she changed her mind. She did want to die. Right here and right now. She didn’t want to live for even a moment in the same world with the creatures that crawled all over the six boys, more horrifying than monsters that stalked nightmares in the deepest ditch of midnight.
Riding the back of one of the boys was a winged creature with the face of a deformed ape and the hairy legs of a spider. One eye was lower than the other, both were red and looked out from under a brow ridge with no forehead at all, only a slanted lumpy skull with horns.
The boy who’d pulled the fisherman’s arms off looked like he was pouting, his lower lip puffed downward, his upper lip pointed like a bird’s beak. He was carrying a rat-shaped demon made out of wasps, its skin as alive as maggots, its eyes the pale yellow of pus, with red centers.
The boy McDoo had bitten carried a lizard-faced monster with tentacles wrapped around him and red eyes without irises. It was oozing a brown goo that smelled like a backed-up sewer, and a sticky strand of it slid down the boy’s face.
The one on the owl-beak boy surveyed her, tilting its head to the side in a motion that disturbed the wasp shape, and it momentarily came apart.
“You can see me,” it said. The voice ripped into her ears, a sound full of hatred and loathing.
She didn’t speak, couldn’t speak. But it could tell she heard from her shuddering reaction to the voice.
“You can, can’t you!” it said triumphantly. Then it threw its head back and laughed, making a sound the antithesis of real laughter, jagged and ugly, that for some reason made Becca think of rotted meat.
All the demons were focused on her now. The boys they inhabited stood, their arms at their sides, their faces blank, their eyes sightless.
“Let’s eat it,” offered a demon that looked like a worm with slimy wet skin and a mouth that held six rows of needles instead of teeth that stretched all the way back down its throat. “Eat it alive. I get the eyeballs!” A wave of that ugly laughter rolled through the assemblage, and the smell of rotting meat made Becca nauseated, and she was afraid she was about to start heaving again.
“She saw,” said the boy McDoo had bitten. He ignored the wound as if it weren’t there. The boy might have howled, but the demon hadn’t felt a thing. “We’ll have to kill her, tie her body down with the other one.”
That solution didn’t appear to appeal to the other boys—no, the demons, it was the demons who were fighting—they were just using the boys to do it. It particularly didn’t appeal to the boy who’d had to tie the body down in the river.
“We don’t have any more rope,” he said.
The argument about the nature of her death and the disposal of her body went on. The redheaded boy’s demon didn’t participate, just cut its eyes from them to her. The demon resembled a dragon, its face elongated, providing a mouth with fangs and double rows of shark teeth beneath a nose with wide black openings and bulging eyes that moved independently, looking everywhere at once. Its body was vaguely lizard-shaped with scales, but its tail was like a scorpion’s. It lifted up over the demon’s body, twitching back and forth, ending in a spike stinger more than a foot long.
“Shut up,” the redheaded boy said and casually backhanded the boy standing next to him. “Killing everybody we come in contact with isn’t exactly low profile.” He leaned closer to Becca, and the stench of him gagged her. “This baby pig is an asset, and we’re going to keep it. At least for a little while.”
That surprised them all into silence.
“She knows,” the dragon demon said. “Don’t you get it? She can help us find the summoner. We’ll take her back to…him”—all the demons cringed—“she’ll tell him whatever he wants to know.” As an afterthought, he added, “Then we can eat it.”
******
2011
Jack Carpenter walked into his kitchen and tossed the manila envelope on the counter. Ignoring it, pretending it wasn’t there. He had swung by the station after taking Theresa home from the emergency room and found it on his desk with a Post-it note saying it’d been delivered by a courier while he was out.
He opened the refrigerator door and stood staring into its almost empty interior. There was a half-full jar of bean dip, some mystery meat in a plastic bag that might once have been pickle-and-pimento loaf, a box of leftover pizza that he was sure had been there for the better part of a month—as had the box of carryout Chinese deli rice beside it—a quart of milk that looked suspiciously solid, and three cans of beer in the racks on the door.
Bad milk or beer? Duh.
He lifted a can of beer out of the rack and closed the door, swearing as he did so that he really was going to go to the grocery store tomorrow—not the Jiffy Stop down the street but a real, no-kidding, actual supermarket with aisles of fresh fruit and vegetables. Ok, so he never ate vegetables, but there would at least be frozen dinners there. Yeah, tomorrow for sure.
But tonight…
He’d put off opening the envelope for as long as he could. Good news was seldom delivered by courier in an anonymous brown envelope. Jack sank down into a comfortable overstuffed chair besieged by a circling herd of fast-food remains. With a sweep of his arm, he cleared the old newspapers and unopened mail off the footstool in front of it, opened the envelope and spread out the contents on the Naugahyde —“the skins from a dozen dead Naugas,” he heard Daniel’s little-kid voice say. Then he sat looking at a handful of black-and-white photographs.
In the same way you can sometimes sense something hurtling at you in the dark, Jack could feel a blow coming. The intensity of the feeling suggested it might be staggering.
The third picture appeared to be exactly the same as the first. Same scene—wide steps with a black wrought iron railing leading up to a sprawling porch. The time stamp was different, though, a few minutes later than the first two pictures.
Jack started looking at every other picture, only the enhanced ones. In the bottom of the frame of the next picture, a person was visible on the bottom step. From that point on, the pictures were not only enhanced, they were enlarged and cropped so all that was visible was the person on the steps. Enlarged like that, Jack could see that the person was a black boy and that he was carrying something, though it was not immediately clear what it was. What was clear, however, bright and shiny clear, was the name printed in big, block letters on the back of the boy’s shirt: Carpenter.
The final picture showed a close-up of what the boy was carrying. Jack’s stomach rolled, he might even have been sick if his cell phone hadn’t rung. He fished the phone out of his pocket. Crock.
“Sergeant Carpenter,” Jack said, trying to sound official.
“You want to tell me what in the Sam Hill’s going on with Theresa Washington?” Crock offered no preamble.
“She went to visit two old friends and found them dead. What’s to tell?”
“You’re going to stand on that?”
“It’s what happened.”
Harrelton Police Department Major Charles Crocker was silent. Jack could picture him brooding. A round, bald, bowlegged man, the major was as formidable as he looked harmless and as clever as he looked goofy. He had a keen wit, a discerning spirit and absolute loyalty to the officers in his command.
He had something else, too. Crock got it. He had let Jack know after the bizarre circumstances that had put Jack in the hospital in July, that he understood there were sometimes forces at work that defied explanation.
“Is this…part of that other?” Crock asked. “What happened before?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Goody,” Crock said.
“I was thinking of more colorful descriptions, but goody will do for now.”
“And the rest of it? The part that’s a zit on your backside—is that part of the other, too?”
“What ‘rest of it’?”
