The Angel of Knowlton Park (18 page)

"It was dark," Gordon said, "I didn't get a good look at him. Mostly, I was seeing him from behind. He was big. Bigger than you. Dark hair. Heavy-set. Wearing jeans and a tee shirt. And his pants rode real low."

"You didn't see his face?"

"Just his butt crack."

"Could you tell anything about his age? Old? Young?"

Gordon considered. "Older than me, I think."

Burgess put Gordon at about 33. "What was he driving?"

"Truck. Big Dodge Ram, double cab, fancy sumbitch. Black. New."

"Who did Timmy hang around with, besides your boys?"

"There was a whole gang of 'em, used to run around the neighborhood. Couple kids lived down near the park. Family named Lane. Big yellow house. The boys are Sydney and Leo; the girl is Gretchen. Sydney can be a bit rough sometimes, Sammy's come home crying once or twice, but kids are... well, you know."

"Anyone else?"

"The art teacher. Timmy really liked her. She gave him books. And Gabe... uh... Officer Delinsky. He was great with all the kids. Him and me, we were going to get a baseball team together, try and do something for these kids... lotta kids who don't have fathers around, and the mothers aren't much for getting out and tossing a ball around."

"You know a kid named Matty McBride?"

Gordon made a face. "He used to pal around with Timmy, when Timmy first moved in. But Matty, he's..." He picked up his coffee cup and crooked his little finger. "A snob, I guess. Thinks he's too good for the rest of us. Poor kid's gotta live here with us working folk 'cuz his rich daddy took off. That's their story, anyway. He used to pal around with Ricky Watts. I don't know what that was about. Ricky's scum. Then Ricky went away. After that Matty mostly treated Timmy like an unwanted pet. But that might have been his mother. She's an even bigger snob."

"You know of anyone in the neighborhood people call 'the witch'? Woman who drives a blue car?"

"I don't," Gordon said. "Maybe Jules does. You want me to ask her?"

"If she's up to it."

"I'll see." Gordon pushed back his chair and went upstairs. Burgess hadn't found out what he did for a living, but whatever it was, it was physical. His workboots were worn and his muscles hadn't come from a gym.

As soon as he heard the heavy feet on the stairs, Burgess dumped out his coffee. He liked it strong, but this stuff would take the enamel off his teeth. Gordon had drunk his without noticing. He filled the cup with water, drank it, and set the cup in the sink, thinking longingly of a cool shower, a soft bed, and Chris. He still had reports to write. By the time he got to bed, if he got to bed, it would be time to get up again.

He sat again and tipped his head back, his lids sliding like fine grade sandpaper over his tired eyes. But it wouldn't do to have Gordon return and find him snoring in the kitchen. There were photos on the refrigerator. He walked over for a closer look. On top, secured by a Ronald McDonald magnet, was one of three boys, a sturdy boy with Gordon's tawny hair, a dark-haired boy with Julie Gordon's smiling eyes, and a third with a mass of white-blond curls. He carried into the light for a closer look. The other two boys were smiling broadly for the camera. Timmy looked uneasy.

Gordon returned as he was studying the picture. "He had that deer in the headlights look a lot, Detective. Too many years getting hit for anything he did." He took the picture and put it back on the refrigerator, then rummaged in the drawer again, turning to hand Burgess another picture. Timmy Watts was standing on top of a climbing structure, grinning hugely, his arms raised in triumph. He looked vibrantly alive and completely happy. "Take it," Gordon said. "Put it on your desk. It'll help you remember what that bastard did."

He tugged at his mustache. "Oh, and Julie says that she hasn't heard of the witch either, but she'll ask around and call if she learns anything. You got a number we can use?"

Burgess gave him a card. "If I'm not there, please leave a message." He had two more questions. "Did Timmy eat here yesterday?"

"You know kids," Gordon said. "Julie didn't want 'em cranky at the cook-out, so she fed them peanut butter and jelly. Timmy, too. She knew he wasn't likely to get fed at home."

"Timmy say anything about running away from home?"

Gordon shook his head. "Not to me. I'll ask Jules."

It was time to go. "Thanks for all your help, Mr. Gordon."

Gordon nodded. "Julie says to tell you Timmy was a pack-rat."

"Do you know what she means?"

"Yeah. Timmy liked to take things. He didn't mean anything by it. I always thought it was just that he'd never had nothin', and he longed for things."

"He take stuff from you?"

"At first. Julie got him to stop. But a packrat, you know, they don't just take stuff, they leave stuff. So sometimes he'd leave us things, too."

"Like what?"

"I dunno. Julie, she kept it all in a box for him like they were his treasures."

"I'd like to see that box."

Gordon looked dubious. "Can it wait 'til tomorrow? She's almost asleep. I'd just as soon not disturb her."

"Tomorrow's fine," he said.

Gordon didn't see him out. He stood by the refrigerator, staring at the picture of the three boys. Burgess pitied his sorrow but took some comfort in knowing that somewhere in Timmy Watts's miserable world there had been smiling faces, loving hearts and a decent, welcoming home.

He gimped his way through the body-temperature air to his car and paused, looking back at the house he'd just left. A man crying in the kitchen. A woman crying upstairs. And two small boys safely asleep, boys whose parents wouldn't sleep easily until Burgess and his team had done their job. If their rough guesstimate was right, by this time last night, someone had repeatedly plunged a knife into a boy's body and Timmy Watts was dead.

Chapter 13

He got home at 12:30, four and a half hours to sleep before he had to start all over again. He showered and went into the bedroom, his skin puckering as he crossed the room. The window air-conditioner was working flat-out and the room was as cold as a meat-locker. Chris had bought the air-conditioner, saying, "You want to have sex in a summer like this, you need air-conditioning." He wasn't complaining.

He slid in, put an arm around her, and pulled her close. Ever the detective, he deduced she was wearing something silky and that there wasn't very much to it, that the secret parts of her body were easily accessible. She turned, feeling for his face in the dark, and kissed him, pressing the length of her body against him. She'd been sharing his bed at least a few days a week since February. Five months and he still got an electric thrill when they lay like this which was almost adolescent.

"I've missed you so much," she said.

He put his hands just below the small of her back, where her hips began to flare, and pulled her tighter. "You feel so good," he said.

"I'm going to feel even better." She touched him, uttering a low murmur of appreciation. "What are you waiting for?"

He fell asleep wondering if he was an irredeemable oaf. Too often, despite the pleasure he took in both her body and her company, they had sex and he fell asleep. Sometimes he fell asleep on top of her. She said she didn't mind, claimed she found it endearing. But didn't she deserve more?

They were already like an old married couple in one unfortunate way—they didn't find time to talk. She was busy, he was busy, they were both tired or had too much on their minds. And there were all the things he didn't want to tell her because they were so ugly. As a nurse, she dealt with some pretty ugly things herself, but he still had that urge to protect her. Like cops everywhere, he tried not to bring the job home. This was a new experience for him. Until now, his life had been his job.

This was his first homicide since the one that brought them together, and it could be a true test of their relationship. He wasn't only worried about their vacation. When he worked a homicide, it was pretty much 24/7. How would she handle his absence, his obsession with the case? Recovering from Kristin Marks, he'd destroyed half his furniture. He had a better handle on himself now, but these cases generated a lot of emotion. Home was where he could be alone and decompress. What would it be like to have company, an audience? What if he lost control and screwed everything up?

He knew Kristin Marks would come tonight. Sometimes he'd stay awake, a bleary-eyed next day preferable to the God-awful visions his brain served up, but tonight he needed sleep. Tomorrow's autopsy would be bad. Then he was stopping at the school for the deaf to see Iris Martin, which would be no picnic either. When he got back, Captain Cote would be waiting. Not a ray of sunshine on his whole horizon. He gritted his teeth as he burrowed down into the pillow.

The dream began on that early morning when he'd responded to an anonymous call about a body and found Kristin lying there in the dump. Even in a dream, Burgess still felt the outrage and fury he'd felt at that moment, staring down at a dead child who'd been snatched off the street, raped, sodomized, and suffocated with her own underpants, then thrown on a trash heap. The dream began the way their video of the crime scene did, starting at a distance and moving closer.

Unlike the video, his dream had all the sensory aspects of memory. There was the striking quality of slanted early morning light, with its incredible contrasts of blinding brightness and dense, purple shadow. There was the strangely deep quality of silence, of being alone in the world, a silence disturbed only by his footsteps crunching over garbage and the shrilling of gulls overhead, the distant susurration of the sea. There was the distorted sense of time intermingled with feeling, of wanting to slow things down, to stop there, in the cool emptiness of the morning, and not take that next step toward what certainty told him lay ahead. There was the fresh tang of sea air corrupted by the smell of refuse, and, as he got closer, the unmistakable smell of death.

Whenever that picture began, Burgess would try to wake, to stop the dream. Sometimes he couldn't. As the dream camera panned in, he saw Kristin, standing on a mound of trash, naked except for the veil she'd worn for her confirmation, her fair hair and the veil billowing back behind her. She came toward him, what looked like white foam coming from her mouth. As she got closer, the foam resolved into maggots, and maggots crawled down her thighs.

This time, she held a small boy by the hand, fair-haired like her, his curls blowing in the breeze, Kristin with her slender child's body, the boy painfully thin. The boy wore bloody patterned underpants, the red slits of his gaping wounds opening and closing like mouths as he walked. They were making high, keening noises, like the shrieks of hawks, and their eyes were soulless and opaque. They came at him at dream speed, as inexorable as zombies.

As he'd done so often that by rights he should be thin, Burgess pushed off the covers, stumbled into the bathroom, and threw up. He brushed his teeth and stood, leaning on the sink, waiting for his stomach to settle.

"The dream?" she said from the doorway.

"This time, there were two children."

She stared at him with troubled eyes, little frown lines in her forehead he wanted to smooth away. "Why did it have to be you?" she asked. "You're not the only detective..." She was wearing something silky blue that dipped low over her breasts. Her long hair was tangled. She looked younger than her thirty-eight years and deeply unhappy.

"It would have been Terry's."

"I see," she said. "Do I blame Terry for ruining our vacation, then?"

"You could blame Vince. He called me. But the real one to blame is the killer. How is Terry, anyway?"

"Miserable. He kept some soup down. That's a start. But how could things get so bad without you noticing?"

"Just what we asked ourselves." He looked at his watch. "I've got to leave for Augusta at five. The autopsy."

"Why such an ungodly hour?"

"You're a nurse. I thought you understood doctors."

"What's to understand?" she said. "There are some nice ones and some saints and a lot of arrogant assholes. Why five?"

"ME wants to cut at seven so he can go play golf, and we've got to finish working the body first."