A Cruel Season for Dying (55 page)

Sakura had driven through the brittle sleet with a single string of words playing over and over in his head:
Let her be alive, let her be alive.
The precipitation had stopped, leaving behind an unwholesome stillness and a flattened sky.

He was losing sense of time again. But he knew it was well more than an hour since he’d left Willie at the hospital and moved
out of the city onto the interstate, into the denseness of upstate New York and the Hudson River Valley. Kelly had checked
in to say they were headed north and would expect him to call if and when he had an exact location.

He shifted in the driver’s seat, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, the stubble of a beard grown darker, the fear
in eyes barely recognizable. One hand clamped hard on the steering wheel, the other reached into the inside pocket of his
jacket, withdrawing his handkerchief. No longer clean, he sought some remnant of laundered freshness inside the linen. Breathing
deeper, he at last found a ghost of the starchiness Hanae had sealed into the cloth. Imagining her pressing perfect creases
into the square, a part of him wanted to cry into the new worn and wrinkled folds, cry for the miserableness of his failure,
cry for what in the end might be lost to him. As a small boy on Hokkaido, when he had felt most alone, he had cried. Had cried
when he ached for a father, who kept between them land and ocean. But this pain, this anger, demanded more of him.

The wings in the locker had confirmed Adrian Lovett as the killer they had sought for so many days. Willie’s witness proved
it had been this serial who had attacked her and Michael. Yet he had no certainty beyond his instincts that this same man
had Hanae.
But who else? And if so, why Hanae?

Willie had tried to explain how Lovett selected his victims.
Auras,
she had said,
he sees auras.
So if he were to save his wife, he must accept that from inside his madness Adrian Lovett had seen an aura around his Hanae,
believed her to be a fallen angel.

Or is Hanae’s abduction merely revenge against me?
With this thought he permitted self-loathing and guilt to join fear. Yet why had she not been murdered in their apartment?
Was Lovett, as in Lucia’s case, seeking greater isolation in which to draw Hanae into his fantasy, to take her life? And his
own?

His headlights reflected off the sign.
Chatwell.
He glanced down at the photo on the seat and drove into the frame of the snapshot. Ahead, diffused illumination filled his
windshield. A convenience store was open for business.

He pulled over, grabbed the photographs, and entered the store. A woman sat behind the register, reading a magazine. She looked
up as he walked to the counter.

“Can I help you?” She worked a wad of gum.

“I hope so.” He handed her the picture of Lovett astride his cycle. “Recognize this guy? Name’s Adrian Lovett.”

She drew up glasses from a chain around her neck and hooked them onto her nose. “Can’t say as I do. But that don’t mean nothing,
since I usually pull the night shift. He a local?”

“No. Probably visits only on weekends and holidays. Has a place somewhere around here.” He showed her the best shot of the
house.

“Can’t tell much from this…. Hey, Leroy.”

A guy in his late twenties came from the back. He shifted the stem of a cigarette between his lips. The cashier handed him
the two photos. “You work days. Know this guy on the motorcycle?”

Leroy grinned, showing off a mouth full of bad teeth around the cigarette. “Would give my right arm for that hog.”

“You know him?”

“Comes in to gas up the Harley once in a while. Dude’s wife was killed a while back,” he said, finally removing the plug of
cigarette. “Filled up that Land Rover of his the day of the accident. Heard she was decapitated.” He sliced a finger across
his neck.

“Know where he might have a house around here?” Sakura shifted the photos in Leroy’s hand.

“Big house.” He angled his head. “But that figures. Rich guy like that.”

“This would be a second home. Name’s Lovett.”

Leroy pressed the cigarette stub out on the floor. “My guess, it’s on the lake. Lots of nice houses built ’round the lake.
Primo real estate.”

“How do I access the lake from here?”

“North end of the lake is fronted by a public road. You can catch it half a mile down. But that might not do you much good.”

“How’s that?”

“The big houses are around the south side. Head-on you can’t see nothing but woods. Got to pick your way through. There’s
a gravel road that works its way in. But the offshoot roads are mostly private driveways. It’s gonna be hit or miss.”

“Will I be able to connect with this gravel road from the public access?”

Leroy nodded, handing back the pictures. “Why you looking for this guy? He in trouble?”

“Maybe. Thanks for the help.” He moved to leave.

“Hey, mister. If you talk to this Lovett, ask him if he wants to sell that cycle.”

The sheet and the blanket drawn up about her, Hanae sat in the bed and listened, making sure that she was really alone. She
shuddered inside the covers, pulling the fabric tighter as if to blot his touch from her skin. But the shudder gave way to
a trembling she could no longer stop. She had done what she had done. Had not resisted while he bathed her, shaved her, and
cut her hair. Had been grateful for the water he had offered.

Adrian Lovett had been her friend. She still felt the connection. It would not help to deny what was true. She had played
on their friendship,
had listened to his madness. Patiently. Agreeing with him when she could. Not challenging, but reasoning against their imminent
deaths, even offering seduction as the price for her life and her baby’s.

But her strategy, she feared, was not working. Adrian was moving to his own internal clock, though he did seem to crave her
understanding and consent. She must try, at least, to use that, to keep him engaged in explanation. A willing pupil who must
be brought along.

If only she had told Jimmy about her new friend. But she had told no one because she had been ashamed of the way she behaved….
That kiss. She had been very foolish, but surely her life and the life of her child were too great a price to be paid. She
loved Jimmy. She had never lost hold of that. She knew that he was searching for her now. She wound that belief around her
as tightly as the covers until her trembling ceased.

The light remained within her, pulsing like a bright beating heart. Her blood beat and the child’s. And Jimmy coming closer.

The owl flashed out of nowhere. Sakura had a sudden sense of it dropping, swooping in from the trees. Dark wings in a glide,
talons grazing his windshield. Chasing something.

His foot hit the brake reflexively, and he swerved, nearly skidding off the gravel before he straightened out. His heart raced,
not with the adrenaline rush of a near accident, but with the consciousness of time running out. How long since he had found
Hanae missing? It seemed like days. There had been hours between Lucia’s abduction and her death. He had to believe that he
still had time, that his hunch about this house was correct.

If he could find the house.

He regretted not having his badge. He’d made up a story about being a representative for an insurance company to the few people
he’d spoken to since the convenience store clerk. If anyone remembered Adrian Lovett at all, he or she remembered the accident
that had killed his wife. None of them knew exactly where he lived.

The last man he’d talked to had sent him down the possibility of yet another branching road. It was a rabbit warren back here,
the houses older and smaller as you moved away from the lake. And spaced much
farther apart. But even here most homes stood dark and empty, owned apparently by “summer people” who wouldn’t return for
months.

He saw a light through the trees. A porch light. The rough-timbered house, set back from the road, was occupied. The multicolored
lights of a Christmas tree filtered through the sheerness of a curtain.

He pulled into the drive and walked up the stairs to the porch. He could see now that the Christmas lights were the old-fashioned
big ones, reflecting in silver-tinsel icicles that shimmered thickly in the branches of the fir. There was no bell. He knocked.

The door was opened immediately by a woman who seemed to have been waiting. Probably she’d heard the car.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I’m looking for the Lovett house.”

A young boy pushed through to stare at him. The cookie in his hand matched the baking smell, which was no doubt coming from
the kitchen. Sakura smiled at him and the woman, waiting for her to say something—gearing up for the photo and the story about
insurance.

“Down there,” she said, pointing up the way he’d been going. “Gravel road turns back toward the lake. Big place. You can’t
miss it.”

“Thank you,” he remembered to say. He was already moving toward the car.

Adrian Lovett touched the shiny steel tip of the hypodermic needle, then ran his finger along the measured surface of the
glass vial. A crystal cage that would at last release him from this earthly existence. No more cleaving to the flesh. No descent
into corporeal mortality to move backward into space and time.

Even now, he had only glossy intimations of his fully realized nature. His most expansive trips on LSD could not return him
to that instant of his awakening, to that absolute purity of moment when he understood who and what he was. So he had drifted
into what might seem an addiction, a struggle to capture that time in the tunnel before resuscitation had clamped its iron
jaws around him. Each time he took the drug, it had moved him closer to some infinite orgasm. Yet always he remained stranded
and frustrated at the lip of the explosion.

He believed this veil that blurred his illumination would regrettably outlast the relinquishing of matter, his separation
from substance. The return to full experience would have to await the others who came after, await Samyaza and the crushing
of the barrier.

Or am I a fool?
Was absolute actualization possible without union with that which he perceived as enemy? Could any one of the Fallen be an
angel separate from God?