The Devil in Gray (5 page)

Eunice Plummer said, “She never lies, Lieutenant. She's incapable of telling any untruth, even if she knows she's going to get punished.”

Decker said, “You go to art class, Sandra? Do you like to draw?”

Sandra nodded. “I like to draw and paint and I like pottery.”

“That's good, because I'll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to draw me a picture of this man you saw walking through the door. Then when you're done, I want you to call this number and I'll send an officer around to your home tomorrow morning to collect it. Do you think you can do that for me?”

“She can do it,” Eunice Plummer put in. “She's really very good.”

“I'm sure she is.”

The officer escorted Eunice Plummer and Sandra back to the police line. Before she ducked under the tape, Sandra turned around and gave Decker a shy little wave. Decker waved back.

“Who's your new girlfriend?” Hicks said.

“A very sweet young lady, that's all I can say.”

“She really see anybody?”

“No, I don't think so. Her mother says she has some kind of extrasensory perception … sees people walking around that nobody else can see. Must be something to do with impaired brain function.”

“So how did you leave it?”

“I've asked her to draw the man she saw, that's all. If nothing else, it might act as some kind of therapy.”

“Since when did you become Bruce Willis?”

CHAPTER FIVE

It was ten after midnight by the time Decker let himself into his loft on Main Street and closed and chained the door behind him. He had been delayed for over fifteen minutes by a construction truck parked across the street while it was loaded with asbestos stripped out of Main Street Station. The station was being renovated and the trains were being brought back into the city center, but the Virginia Board of Health still had offices in what had once been the train shed, so asbestos stripping could only be done at night.

Decker tossed his crumpled black linen coat onto the couch and eased off his heavy shoulder holster, hanging it up on the old-style hat stand. He hadn't eaten since eleven this morning and he had bought two chicken breasts with the intention of making himself a Mexican chicken stir-fry, but he was well past hunger—and he was far too tired to cook anything now. He put the chicken into the fridge and walked back into the living area.

He switched on the television, although he kept the sound turned off. On-screen, a witch was being burned at the stake in agonized silence. He went across to the mirrored drinks cabinet, took out a
caballitos
shot glass, and poured himself a slug of Herradura Silver tequila. He knocked it back in one and stood for a moment with his eyes watering before pouring himself another. It was made from 100 percent blue agave, one of the most expensive tequilas you could buy.

He could see that his answering machine was blinking red and he could guess who it was, but he didn't feel like answering it. He took his drink over to the window and looked out over Canal Walk and the James River, the water glistening as black as oil, with a thousand lights dancing in it, yellow and red and green.

He had moved to Canal Walk Lofts over a year ago, but in spite of all the pictures and personal clutter that he had brought with him he still felt as if he were a stranger, living without permission in somebody else's apartment. Come to that, he still felt as if he were living without permission in somebody else's life.

The walls were all painted gunmetal gray and the floor was shiny red hardwood, although it was badly scuffed in front of the chair that faced the television. The couch and the armchairs were upholstered in soft black leather, and there was a glass-and-chrome coffee table with dozens of overlapping rings on it where glasses and coffee mugs had stood. Amongst the rings stood a bronze statuette of an ecstatic naked dancer, her hair flying out behind her; as well as an enamel-plated shield from the Metro Richmond Police for marksmanship; heaps of
TV Guides
and
Guns & Ammo
and
Playboy
and newspapers; an ashtray from the Jefferson Hotel; and a well-thumbed copy of
Your Year in the Stars: Capricorn
.

Along one wall ran a long black mahogany bookcase, crammed with a mixture of John Grisham novels and technical manuals for dismantling guns and rebuilding automobiles and step-by-step guides to Mexican and southern cookery. At the far end were ten or eleven books on mysticism and life after death, including the biography of Edgar Cayce, the famous clairvoyant, and Zora Hurston, the anthropologist who had investigated the zombie cult in Haiti.

On the wall above the bookcase hung a huge brightly colored print of a Dutch girl sitting in a field of scarlet tulips, wearing a snow-white bonnet and bright yellow clogs. Her stripy skirt was lifted and her legs were wide apart, her vulva as scarlet as the tulips. Next to it were more nudes, darker and moodier, and three etchings of a couple entwined together. But on the other side of the room, close to the window, there was a gallery of more than twenty photographs framed in black, some of them color and some of them black-and-white. All of them showed the same dreamy-looking blonde with dark brown eyes and very long fine hair.

Decker, as he always did, raised his glass to her.

“Another day in paradise, baby.”

He drew the loosely woven drapes, and then he went through to the bedroom where his king-size bed remained exactly as he had left it that morning, the sheets twisted like the Indian rope trick and the pillows all punched out of shape. He had always been a restless sleeper, prone to nightmares, and the state of the bed was a silent but eloquent record of last night's journeys through the country of shadows—a country where faceless people murmured in his ears and strange white shapes fled ahead of him through endless arcades.

Beside the bed stood more photographs of the dreamy-looking blonde, one of them showing her arm in arm with Decker on the pedestrian walkway under the Robert E. Lee Bridge, her right hand raised to keep the sun out of her eyes.

Decker stripped off his clothes, dropping them onto the bed, and went through to the white-tiled bathroom. He stepped into the shower and turned it on full-blast. For some reason the Maitland case had left him feeling very tired and discouraged. All homicides were messy and disgusting, and there were always loose ends and blind alleys and confusing evidence. On its own, the disappearance of the murder weapon wouldn't have worried him unduly. The circumstantial evidence against Jerry Maitland was overwhelming. But it was hard to imagine
why
he should have attacked his wife so frenziedly, and killed their unborn baby. He had a great job, an idyllic house, and everything in the world to look forward to. Unless he had violent schizophrenic tendencies that nobody had guessed at, there didn't seem to be any motive for his actions at all.

And then there was Sandra's So-Scary Man in gray. Gray hat, gray coat, and
wings
, whatever that meant. Decker didn't believe in ghosts and he didn't believe in reincarnation. After Cathy's death, he had wanted to, desperately, almost to the point of madness. He had talked to dozens of mediums and clairvoyants and read everything he could about “psychic phenomena.” Anything to touch Cathy again, anything to talk to her and smell her and wake up in the morning with her hair spread out on the pillow. Anything to tell her how sorry he was.

But after three months of sick leave and nearly a thousand dollars of savings wasted on séances and “spirit empathy sessions,” he had come to accept that she was truly gone. He didn't quite know how it had happened. He had been walking through Hollywood Cemetery one afternoon, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was buried, along with eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers, and he had realized how silent it was, apart from the traffic on Route I and the endless rushing of the James River rapids. There was nobody there. No spirits, no whispers. The dead were dead and they never came back.

One thing he had learned from his research into clairvoyance, however, was that some people were capable of faking occult phenomena. They could throw their voices, or make themselves temporarily invisible to those around them, or at least
unnoticed
. It was nothing supernatural, it was simply a trick, like stage magic, or hypnotism, or an optical illusion. Because of her mental disability, it was conceivable that Sandra had been unaffected by whatever gimmick the man in gray had employed to distract the attention of passersby. That was why—the more Decker thought about it—the more interested he was in seeing the figure that Sandra might draw.

He shampooed his hair with Fix and felt the suds sliding down his back. He was beginning to relax now. One more shot of tequila as a nightcap, and he was going to bed, and to sleep, and tonight with any luck he wouldn't have quite so many nightmares. He reached for his towel and climbed out of the shower.

As he did so, he thought he heard a clicking sound coming from the living area. He stood still and listened. Nothing. It must have been the air-conditioning. He dried himself and went back into the bedroom. He was opening his drawer to take out a clean pair of boxer shorts when he heard it again.
Click
—
click
—
click
.

He stepped into his shorts and then stood perfectly still and listened. Almost half a minute passed. Then
click
—
click
—
click
. And then a rattle.

It sounded as if there were somebody in the kitchen, rather than the living area. Decker opened his closet door and took out his baseball bat. He just hoped that if it
was
an intruder, he hadn't noticed that a fully loaded Colt Anaconda was hanging from the hat stand right outside the kitchen doorway.

Click
—
click
. Decker eased the bedroom door open a little wider and then stepped out into the living area, keeping his back close to the wall. His holster was still where he had hung it up, thank God. But the odd thing was that the front door was still locked, and the security chain was still fastened.

He made his way across the wooden floor, trying not to make sticky noises with his warm feet. He reached the opposite wall and flattened himself against it, breathing deeply to steady himself.

The clicking continued, intermittently. Then he heard something else, and his back prickled as if cockroaches were rushing down it.
Singing. High-pitched, breathy singing
. Quite tuneless, and the words were barely distinguishable. But it was singing and it was Cathy. She had always sung like that.

Decker felt as if the entire world were tilting underneath his feet. Cathy was dead. He had seen Cathy dead. He had convinced himself that ghosts didn't exist and spirits couldn't be summoned back and yet here she was, singing in his kitchen in the middle of the night. It gave him a feeling of dread far greater than any intruder could have inspired. He lifted the baseball bat and his hands were shaking so much that he had to lower it again. Besides, what was he going to do, if it really
was
her? Hit her?

Decker took a sharp breath and stepped into the kitchen doorway. The singing abruptly stopped and there was nobody there. He stood there for a while, not knowing what to do. He cleared his throat and said, “Cathy? Are you here, Cathy?” but of course there was no reply. He took another step forward, and sniffed, in the hope that he might be able to smell her, that distinctive flowery perfume she always wore, but there was no trace of it.

He peered around the corner of the kitchen toward the brightly lit countertop next to the sink. On top of his seasoned-oak chopping board there was a pattern of pale, glistening lumps. At first Decker couldn't understand what he was looking at, but with a growing sense of eeriness he realized that it was a
face
, with staring eyes and jagged teeth—not a real face, but a face that had been fashioned out of slices of raw chicken, with a pointed breastbone for a nose, two slices of banana for eyes, and teeth made from diced-up apple.

It was unsettlingly lifelike, and the way it was looking at him made him feel as if it were just about to speak. But who had created it, and why, and
how?
A small sharp knife lay beside the chopping board, but whoever had used it had completely vanished.

Decker paced slowly up and down the kitchen, waving his baseball bat from side to side, as if it might come into contact with somebody invisible. Again, he whispered, “Cathy? Are you here, sweetheart? Talk to me, Cathy.” But there was still no reply, only the mournful hooting of a ship on the river.

He went back into the living area and checked behind the drapes. The windows were closed and locked, so nobody could have escaped by climbing out that way. Besides, it was a sixty-foot drop to the street. He went back to the bedroom and opened all of the closet doors. Nobody. He frowned down at the photo of Cathy beside the bed. “Was that you? Or am I going out of my mind?”

He returned to the kitchen. He stared at the chicken-meat face for a while but he had no idea what significance it had, if it had any significance at all. He thought of Jerry Maitland, saying, “There was nobody there … there was cutting and cutting but there was nobody there.”

He wondered if he ought to call Hicks to take a look, but he decided against it. Hicks needed his sleep and—besides—Decker didn't want to give the impression that he was losing his grip. He had seen it happen too many times before, detectives subtly falling apart. Their breakdowns were mostly caused by the steady erosion of suppressed grief, after one of their partners had been killed; or after their marriages had broken up, and they had lost custody of their children; or after they had been called out to one too many grotesquely mutilated bodies. They always
thought
that they were keeping their emotions under control, while all of their fellow officers could see that they were as brittle as an automobile whose bodywork had rusted right through to the paint.