“You want to talk about it?” He meant the situation with Hamill.
She looked at her husband for a moment. “Hamill is a wreck. He’s off the case, like I said, he may be out of a job. He messed with things, I think. He was drinking at the bar where one of the victims worked. And he, ah . . . So he paid off the bouncer — the one who could recognize him from boozing — to switch shifts the night we went to question people.”
“Oh wow.”
She found it hard to tell Shawn about Hamill’s affair. She was afraid where it would lead the conversation.
“And then there’s this whole thing with the bartender giving a false name. He’s definitely involved somehow. Owner said his name was Charlie Plume; that info just came in today.”
“You think Hamill knew about him?”
She shook her head, slowly. “No . . . I don’t know. I’ll know more tomorrow, after we talk with him again.”
“Hamill made a mess for himself, that’s for sure.”
“Oh and then there’s Perry Brady. A student who recognized Hamill the night we showed up, first night of the case. He ran from us. Led us to Holly Arbruster, another victim.”
She trailed off. She took another sip of her tea. She could feel Shawn watching her closely.
“You sure this college kid — what did you say his name was? Brady? Are you sure that’s where he led you? To her?”
“I’ve thought about that. Yes and no. I mean, Hamill and I didn’t find anyone ourselves. Plattsburgh PD did when they searched the area for the runner.”
“So Brady led you . . . to what? Within a few hundred yards or something?”
“Or more, I’d say. Quarter mile, maybe half mile.”
She sat back, letting her own words sink in. She remembered running after Perry Brady, feeling winded. Past the gas station, towards the paper mill, and then Brady had slipped over a chain-link fence. He could’ve gone anywhere after that point.
She thought aloud, “If you’re running from the cops in that part of town, where do you go? You run into the dark. Into the woods. I don’t know if Brady had any idea we’d find Holly Arbruster there. If he did, I don’t think he was the one to put her there. She could have drifted from the lake into the marsh. I think Brady was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I don’t know.”
“Can you pick him up again?”
“Yeah. That’s the idea for tomorrow. Interview Brady, interview Hamill. Weather permitting, I guess.”
Her husband watched her quietly. “Hamill went to all this trouble to cover up his drinking?”
Dana cleared her throat and set down the mug. “He was seeing a student. Sleeping with her, I guess.”
Shawn rolled his eyes. “Oh Jesus. You’re kidding.”
“And there’s something else,” she said. Her voice sounded faraway in her ears. She stared into the candles on the table. She drew a long, slow breath. “He kissed me.”
Shawn remained silent for a moment. “Rob did.”
She nodded. She could feel the tears stinging against the backs of her eyes, but she suppressed the emotion.
“When?”
“Last week. Night after I got out of the hospital.”
More heavy silence from Shawn. She wanted to slice through it, she wanted to scream, she wanted to tell her husband that she missed him, she loved him; she worried she was losing her mind. But something prevented her, and she just sat, averting her eyes.
“Did you kiss back?”
It was the question she’d expected all week. “I don’t know,” she said, at last meeting his gaze.
He held her look for a moment, and then turned his head away, nodding to himself.
“What are you thinking?”
The question seemed to pain him. “I’m thinking we’ve got a lot on our plates.”
“What does that mean?”
He faced her. “It just means a lot. This has been the biggest case of your career, I know that. Lot of pressure. And you and Hamill have a long history together, and he obviously can’t control himself . . .” He stood up so suddenly that the chair wobbled, then righted itself. He moved off into the kitchen, ruffling the candle flames. Then he stopped, and she held her breath. She watched his chest rise and fall. She jumped when he smashed his fist through a cabinet door.
* * *
Downstairs, she lay with Ria, the only girl who had been disturbed by the loud noise upstairs — Sarah was absorbed in a movie, Kayla was snoring. It took some time, lying next to her daughter, stroking her hair. Even when she was sure the girl had fallen back asleep, Dana lay there. She smelled her daughter’s hair. Dana’s face was wet from crying. Of all things, she thought of Lori Stender’s drawing, the one in Scott’s room.
She left, cleaned herself up, and went upstairs. Shawn was still at the table, staring into space. His knuckles were bleeding. She wanted to tend to that, to wash his hand, to bandage it, but she held off. She sat across from him, and waited until he could look at her, until he spoke.
“Hamill’s mind isn’t in the right place,” her husband said at last. “And yours may not have been lately, either. And I know things have been hard here at home, so . . .”
She opened her mouth to speak, and for a second the words would not come.
“Shawn . . . I’m so sorry.”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “It never happens again.”
“Never.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes, and then she urged her husband to bed. He protested, but she wasn’t taking no for an answer. She took his boots off. The cats purred around on the floor; one of them jumped up beside Shawn. Dana climbed up onto her husband, straddling him, and she gave him a kiss. Her body was tense, on alert, anticipating his rejection.
His kiss was responsive, and he arched his back up and took her in his arms. When the second cat tried to get up onto the bed, Shawn gave it a soft kick and it leapt from the bed. The husband and wife laughed, still kissing, Dana crying again.
“I love you,” she said. “I’m going to make all of this up to you, and to the girls.”
Shawn rolled over on top of her, and began to undress her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE / Into the Night
An hour later she was back at the kitchen table, unable to sleep. She found the crossword puzzle in the local paper and worked her way through it by candlelight, willing herself to get tired. It was just ten p.m., they’d always been a household of early-to-bed-early-to-rise. But, it wasn’t working, and the crossword clues kept making her think of the murders, and inevitably she tiptoed downstairs and pulled the file on the case.
Back at the kitchen table again, she flipped it open, big as the King James Bible by this point. She tabbed over to the Scott Dunham section where she had pinned a printout of the drawing in the boy’s room. The bull-creature looked back at her, its watering eye staring out. She pulled the picture and began working her way to the Lori Stender section to put it there.
The house was still and quiet as Dana turned the pages.
She stopped at the Angie Gilroy section of the file. Angie Gilroy was twenty years old. From Malone, New York, sophomore at Plattsburgh State. She had called the police to report that Holly Arbruster was missing. Forty-eight hours later, the police had begun a search.
Gilroy lived on Cornelia Street in Plattsburgh, sharing a house with Arbruster and one other girl. Gilroy worked at a breakfast place and often babysat for extra cash.
Dana paused, letting the last piece of information sink in. She babysat. That was a misleading term, if there ever was one. You think “babysit,” and you think of an infant or toddler. But kids as old as thirteen had babysitters.
She let some thoughts come together. Lori Stender’s peculiar artwork somehow gets into the hands of Scott Dunham. She drew it, she says, months before ever participating in the study or meeting Rakesh Lata. But maybe she had read Lata’s book by then — Dana had never asked. She could have been interested in this type of my
thology for years. Stender blamed herself for getting Sonia Taylor involved.
Dana flipped through the file until she got to Lori Stender’s class schedule. She looked at the previous semester. She found the class roster for Studio Art 2. She ran her finger down the list, until she stopped on a name.
Angie Gilroy.
Angie Gilroy and Lori Stender had been in the same art class, just as Lori had said. Had Angie Gilroy babysat for Scott Dunham? Why not? He was a ten-year-old kid with a single mother. Surely Teresa, the mother, needed someone to watch him from time to time?
Would Angie have stolen something like that? The work of another student? Lori hadn’t thought so, but maybe Gilroy was jealous of the skill Lori showed. Maybe she wanted to pass it off as her own. And then Scott Dunham, he had already shown a proclivity for theft — he’d taken a victim’s backpack from the Clair River. So, two thieves, maybe.
It was a lot of maybes.
Gilroy could have stolen Lori’s drawing, or it could have been someone else. Whoever it was, Dana felt almost positive it was sitting in Scott Dunham’s bedroom.
There was only one way to know for sure. She needed to ask the boy. And given that she wasn’t sleeping, that the Feds had taken over, that she’d had her own partner arrested, and that in ten days hadn’t solved one of the three murders, there was no time like the present.
* * *
The storm came fast and heavy, but she told herself tomorrow would be worse. The roads were already slick with a kind of snow that had the Corsica’s tires slipping, the back end kicking out as she pulled onto Route 4. Fresh snowflakes dove towards the windshield, like she was driving into the stars.
She wondered if someone like Rakesh Lata could be right, that humans had ancient knowledge, deep in their DNA, about the origins of life.
Past Lives.
Rakesh believed in clairvoyance. He believed we each had an electromagnetic signature, unique as fingerprints. Unique as diatoms.
“There’s our smiley face right there,” she said inside the empty car. A contested theory about an infamous series of murders. But it wasn’t diatoms connecting the killings. It was, like Hamill suggested, much simpler. It was someone, perhaps, who’d seen a drawing. Who’d found a book. Who’d overheard conversations they didn’t like. Or maybe that they did like, but which had boiled their blood just the same.
Rakesh had warned her about the Mahabharata War, a time when mankind had declined to an irretrievable point. Maybe that’s what the killer fed on. Maybe the killer thought he was taking out the trash. Thinning the herd. Doing God’s good work.
The age of darkness, when moral virtue and mental capabilities reach their lowest point in the cycle.
She came up behind a snowplow and drove agonizingly slowly for a few minutes before she saw an opportunity to pass. As she accelerated past the hulking machine with its lazily twirling yellow lights, headlamps coming from the other direction blasted through the curtains of snow. She pressed on the gas pedal and passed the plow just before the vehicle in the other lane reached her. The plow trumpeted an angry horn.
Dana hunched over the steering wheel and urged her vehicle faster.
* * *
It should have been a five minute drive, but she pulled into the trailer park almost twenty minutes later. Everything was dark; the entire area had failed power. There were a few visible candles flickering in the windows. Dana wondered how many people had heeded the media’s advice to stock up on supplies, and how many had brushed it off as consumption propaganda. This time, the media seemed to be right.
She switched her headlights off as soon as she turned into the warren of lopsided trailers. The junk populating the area was covered in a thick blanket of snow, which was falling just as hard as it had an hour before. At least six inches had already piled up. It would be a foot deep soon.
She sat with the engine running, the heater blasting, but she still felt chilled at her core. She kept watch on one trailer through the foggy windshield. The trailer where Scott lived, with the drawing of the bull-man.
Her pulse was steady. As emotional and volatile as she’d been over the past couple of weeks, she felt almost serene now. Cold, empty, but calm. She turned her pea coat collar up and got out of the car.
The snowfall was ominously quiet. The snow gathered in her hair and melted, cold rivulets against her scalp. She approached the trailer where Scott lived with his mother. She thought she caught movement from behind one of the windows. She stood in front of the narrow, plastic door and knocked.
Footsteps approached. The locks disengaged and the interior door opened. A second later the narrow storm door swung out. Teresa Dunham stood there looking down at Dana. Dana wasn’t sure, but she thought the woman was wearing the same peach-colored housedress she’d been in two weeks ago. She didn’t offer a polite smile. Dana didn’t blame her, it was ten thirty on a Sunday night and here was a cop at her door.
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am . . .”
“What is it?” She looked away from Dana, past her, into the storm. “You came out in this?”
“Everything’s fine, ma’am. I was wondering if I could just have a few words with you. It will be really quick.”
She scowled at Dana, and bit her lower lip. “What do you need to talk about?”
“Can I come in?”
She sighed heavily for Dana’s benefit. She leaned back and glanced into the trailer. Dana heard the boy’s voice. “Mom?”
Teresa seemed to consider it for a few more seconds. Finally, she rolled her eyes and stepped back, stretching to hold the door open. “Fine,” she said. “Got no TV anyway.”
Dana smiled and stepped up into the trailer. Teresa closed the doors behind her and then backed away into the small kitchenette, until her large rear end bumped against an ironing table. Down the narrow hallway, Scott stood in the gloom of the candlelit living room.
“Hey, pal.”
“Hey,” he said, his arms stiffly at his sides.
“Still working on those drawings?”
Scott raised his shoulders. “Um, yeah.”
“Cool. Hey, I’d like to talk to you in just a minute, but first I’m just going to chat with your mom. That okay with you? Everything’s alright, just police work.” She noticed a stack of newspapers at the end of the counter, beside a large, glowing candle. A headline blared, THIRD VICTIM IN WHAT POLICE ARE CONSIDERING SERIAL CRIME.
There was a picture of Maggie Lange, which looked like she was smiling. Full of promise.
“Sure, whatever,” Scott said. He walked off into his bedroom.
Teresa watched her son go, still chewing her bottom lip. There was a small table with two chairs. Dana motioned, “Like to sit down with me?”
“I’m fine,” Teresa said flatly.
Dana pulled out a chair. She didn’t want to sit, but she thought it might settle the woman’s nerves. Teresa looked at a closed door at the back of the room.
Mustering as much of a casual tone as she could manage, Dana asked, “I wonder if we could talk about Scott’s artwork?”
The woman’s expression became incredulous. “His artwork? You came out in this weather to talk about his artwork?”
“When I was here two weeks ago, Scott said his father was in jail.”
She flinched. “He’s at Dannemora. He’s got another twenty years on his sentence.”
“Scott told me his father was an artist.”
“Well, I don’t know if you could call him an artist. He used to doodle. Would draw all over the phone book.”
“Have you seen the drawing Scott has, where there is a person with the head of a bull?”
Teresa pressed her lips together into a tight, bloodless line. Then she spoke. “He has nightmares about it, you know.”
“About the drawing?”
Teresa wrung her hands together. “Scott has dreams about that girl he found.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
The woman looked down.
“I
have reason to believe that drawing isn’t his own work. You think maybe he took it? Like he took the backpack of the victim we found in the river?”
“I don’t know.”
Dana kept her voice low. “Mrs Dunham, do you hire a babysitter sometimes? For Scott?”
Teresa glanced up, then scowled. “Well, yeah. I got to have some social life, right?”
Dana smiled. Her face felt stiff. “I hear that. Did you ever hire a girl named Angie Gilroy?”
“Angie? Sure. She’s been here a lot.”
“Okay, good. Good to know.”
A deeper scowl. “You think Scott stole that picture from her?” It sounded like pitcher.
“I don’t know. It could have been given to him. By Angie, maybe someone else. I think he likes to draw, and associates that drawing ability with his father. Wants to maybe make his father proud, so calls it his own.”
Teresa’s face suddenly crumbled, and she turned and leaned into the sink. Dana wondered if the woman was going to be sick. “Scott’s drawings are very good, Mrs Dunham. Just that one, that one was maybe a little advanced, you know?”
It struck her how absurd the whole thing was. Here in some woman’s trailer with her ten-year-old son, in the middle of a blizzard, consoling this woman about her boy’s macabre artwork.
“I know this is a personal question, Mrs Dunham, but who else might come to your house?”
When Teresa didn’t respond, Dana’s training and instincts kicked back in. She didn’t like that closed door in the back of the room. She slipped out of the kitchen and quickly grasped the knob and turned. It was pitch black in the room. She peered into the darkness, her calm finally giving way to the hard beating of her heart, a band of perspiration breaking across her forehead.
“I like to sleep in the cold,” Teresa said.
Dana spun around to see Teresa just a few steps behind her. The woman’s face was masked by shadows, but she sounded completely together, no longer a blubbering mess. “The heat is electric,” she said. “With the power off, I’m trying to keep the warmth in here.”
Dana pulled the door slowly shut. “Of course,” she said. “I’m just going to talk to Scott now, if you don’t mind.”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 20
