Blood Of Angels (42 page)

'You're sure this was the same van?'

'Pretty sure.'

'Still could just be a local. I can run the plates.'

'Whatever,' I said, walking towards the gate. 'I'm going to take a look at that house.'

I opened the gate, watching the house for signs of reaction to our entry. The house looked dead, the windows on the upper floor a dark and opaque grey. The grass the other side of the gate had been flattened in an obvious track. We walked across the yard, swish, swish through the long stalks. Stopped after over half the distance, and looked around. Back up near the road some bird made a random twittering sound in one of the trees.

'The van has been out more than once in the last few days.'

'But if it lives here,' I said, 'and comes in and out every day, how come the grass it's knocked over is so high?'

Monroe considered, and reached in his jacket. He pulled out his gun, checked it. I did the same.

'Let's do this carefully,' he said.

'You don't want backup?'

'On the strength of bent grass?'

He smiled, and I realized that he did want to call in but knew it would look twitchy. That he had to prove to himself he was still whole after being shot earlier in the year. And that Nina meant a lot to him, too.

'Lead the way, chief,' I said. 'I learned this stuff watching TV.'

He headed straight for the front door. I approached in a wider arc that took me far enough to the side that I could check along it. Nothing to see except more slipping boards and overgrown bushes. Either the owner was very down on yard work or he/she had returned recently after a considerable absence.

I followed Monroe up onto the porch. The windows to the right of the door were dusty and cobwebbed inside. I stood up against the wall, ready to move fast if need be. Monroe reached out and knocked.

There was no response. He knocked again. Nothing.

He gently took the door handle in his hand. Gave it a turn. The door clicked open. He steadied it with his fingers so it wouldn't swing too far.

He looked at me. I knew what he meant. Either someone was inside and not responding to summons, or the house was empty.

I gestured with my head.
We're going inside
.

He knew that anyway.

I stepped away from the wall while he opened the door. Nothing untoward came of this, so I followed him as he stepped carefully inside. I took the door from him and pushed it quietly shut after us.

Listened to the dust.

Ahead was a dark hallway. Open doors either side, leading to living areas. Monroe nodded to me to take one. He stepped sideways into the other, gun held out and down. I don't know what he saw, but the room I looked in had more dust, very thick, and yet with furniture and pictures in place. Books still in a case along the back wall. Old novels and mathematics texts.

We re-entered the hallway and walked down it, trying not to set off the floorboards. A couple more rooms — dining, small study — both much the same. A large kitchen in the centre back. This too looked like it had been tidied long ago, but as if someone had forgotten to take their stuff with them when they left. No signs of vandalism. Either the local kids were remarkably well behaved, or it was a place they didn't like.

Monroe and I looked at each other, then went around the corner to the bottom of the stairs to the upper floor. I waited at the bottom while he moved carefully up them, keeping his back close to the wall and his head and gun facing upwards. When he held the top, I followed.

There were three bedrooms. We split up to look them over. All had beds still in place. One of the beds had been stripped long ago, and lacked its mattress. A wooden chair stood near the middle of this room, and a lampshade lay on the floor. There were some leaves and bits of glass lying around.

When I came back out into the upper hallway Monroe was still in one of the other rooms. I checked the bathroom, which was as quiet and faded as everywhere else. I stepped back out and was just beginning to relax a little when I thought I heard something.

It was coming from one of the rooms I'd already been in. The one with the chair.

A sniff, or soft ripping sound?

I straightened my arms, bringing the gun up a little higher. Walked very quietly back to the bedroom at front right. Stood outside the door a moment.

And saw a small shadow slide across the wall inside.

Monroe came out of the main bedroom. I quickly held up a hand, first finger straight. He stopped in his tracks. I indicated the room. He gave a single upwards nod of his head.

I took a step in, gun pointed down the far end. Turned quickly back to sweep across the long wall. Went back. Took another step. Dropped to one knee to stare uncertainly under the bed, the one which had been left without a mattress. There was nobody in the room.

I turned to see Monroe standing at the door. 'Did you hear anything?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'What was it?'

I shook my head. 'Nothing, I guess. Never mind.'

I let out a long overdue breath. The whole house seemed to exhale around me.

We walked back down the stairs. Took another look around the rooms there and wound up back in the kitchen.

'I think we've drawn a blank, Ward.'

'It's still the van I saw,' I said. 'The fact nobody's home doesn't change that.'

'It doesn't make it into anything we can use, either. We…'

He stopped talking, looking over my shoulder. I turned to see an unobtrusive door set into the back wall.

'Cupboard?'

'Don't think so,' he said, his voice low again. 'It's under the central stairwell.'

I reached out and pulled the door. It opened onto blackness. Cool air floated up towards us. I put my hand through the opening and felt around for a light switch. Found one. Flipped it.

Wooden stairs led to a cellar.

We walked down. The basement was a large, rectangular space and it was empty. I was about to turn straight around and head back up, but Monroe stopped me.

'Wait,' he said. 'Look at the floor.'

The harsh light from the single hanging bulb made it obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. The dirt and dust on the floor was not evenly distributed, but scuffed up in a series of large and irregular swirls. Kind of like what might happen if someone had recently moved around over it, someone whose movements were constricted. Something made me drop to one knee and put my hand gently in amongst it. Stare down at it, and listen.

Monroe had moved to a further portion of the floor and was doing something similar.

'Okay,' he said, his voice tight. 'I think we might have found something here.'

I looked up reluctantly. 'What?'

'Blood smear, faint. Someone did a decent job of trying to clear it up. But there's staining evidence of volatile fatty acids too. As if a body lay here for a while.'

'Alive or dead?'

'Immediately after death,' he said. 'Okay. We might have found where Gulicks stored her first victim before she took off the flesh.'

'You think this disturbed dirt came from him?'

I didn't want him to say yes, and he knew it.

'I don't know, Ward. But it probably is. This place is maybe to do with Gulicks. There's nothing concrete to put Nina here.'

'But the van moved here after she was in custody.'

He thought. 'True. Let's go take a look at it.'

He trotted up the stairs. I waited a moment and looked down once again on the swirls in the dust. Had Nina made them? Shouldn't you be able to feel the presence of someone you loved, even if they weren't there any longer? Shouldn't that be what your senses were for? I tried, but I couldn't tell. I could feel something in this house, but I couldn't tell if it was an echo of her.

I started towards the stairs but on impulse reached up and knocked the dangling bulb with my hand, just to provoke a change in the light. The bulb swung irregularly back and forth, throwing its glare into different corners. It made the staining Monroe had noticed a little more obvious — and forced me to wonder if it had been a man's body after all, or more recent, and a woman's.

And something glinted up close to the far wall.

I stepped quickly over to it, through thick and dodging shadows. I squatted down and felt around with my hands. My fingers brushed over something sharp. I grabbed it.

It was a bracelet. Cheap, plated silver ringlets, mottled pieces of indifferent turquoise. The chain was broken, as if it had caught against something and snapped.

But it was not tarnished, which said it had not lain here for years. And it looked a lot like something I remembered Nina picking up for six dollars in a small town we passed through when we took one of our vague road trips east from Sheffer.

I wasn't sure. Nowhere near. But suddenly the shapes in the dust looked like somebody I recognized.

I ran up the stairs. I knew this probably wasn't going to be enough for Monroe. But for the first time in two days, I felt I'd been close to her.

I made it out onto the porch and then stopped in my tracks. There was something in the yard. Something large, lying half-hidden in the long grass.

My gun was back in my hand. I moved sideways along the porch, trying to get a better angle to see what the thing was. Glanced across at the van. Called out softly:

'Charles? Where are you?'

Nothing but the wind moving the leaves at the very tops of the trees. I quickly swung from far left to far right. Nothing to see there either.

I stepped carefully down off the porch and walked towards the shape lying on the ground. I kept my gun on it until I recognized the colour of the suit.

Monroe was lying face down. He was not moving. The grass around him was flecked red, as if with tiny wild flowers.

I pulled him quickly over onto his back. There was blood everywhere. There were deep, straight channels hacked into his forehead and face and neck, revealing meat and chipped bone. A tooth glinted through a hole in his cheek, clean, polished.

His jaw sagged slowly to the side, releasing a dark clot of something from inside, and his last breath shaped a word.

Sorry.

I said his name but his eyes were already flat, and not even looking in the same directions.

I knelt, staring down at him, not knowing what to do or who had done this. I reached for the pulse in his neck but it was beating in some other place now. He had gone. The person called Charles Monroe wasn't there any more, just a thing that looked very like him, a dead thing adrift and a thousand miles from home.

I heard the swishing of long grass. Loud.

I looked up—

A man was running at me from the left side of the house. A big man, with a huge knife in his hand.

I swivelled my arms up and right and fired before I really took in what was coming at me.

The bullet hit him in the shoulder. I shoved myself backward, barely making it up to my feet.

The man tried to keep coming, and almost had the momentum to make it far enough to strike. I kept backing up and shot him in the thigh, and he swivelled and fell and slid.

I didn't give him a chance to get up but ran over and stomped on his hand until it no longer held the knife. Picked it up and threw it as far as I could into the long grass.

I stood back out of arm's length and pointed the gun at the man's face. His hair was grey. His hands and face were spattered with Monroe's blood and his own.

'Tell me who you are,' I said. 'And tell me where she is.'

He stared up at me, as if confounded. 'It's you,' he said. 'It's always you.'

'You don't know me.'

'It was always you.'

'I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm not…'

'Just get it over with. Please, please get it done.'

'Oh, I'll kill you. Count on that.'

I stepped onto his chest and pressed the gun against his forehead with all of my weight. 'But you have tell me first.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

He was a man called Jim Westlake. He was a man called James Kyle. He/they had lived here and he/they had killed eighteen women over twenty years, ending with his wife, who had lain in the woods fifteen minutes' walk from here, until John and I found her. Things had come to a point. Did I understand? Things had just come to a point. He had not realized back then that people had known about him for a long time, people who were not the police but who understood why women in Owensville and Rackham and further afield occasionally disappeared. They even knew where he had buried them, and they approved. Someone he called the Forward-Thinking Boy had come on the worst night, the last of that old life, the night when he was alone in his house with no wife any more and a child who ran to hide from him because she had realized he was all wrong, who ran up to her bedroom and crawled underneath her own bed as if he was a storm come to get her. He had buried his wife only two nights before and he knew he was lost and everything had unravelled and come to a point: as he placed Laurie in the ground he had looked up and in the moonlight he thought he saw a pool of dark blood hovering four feet in the air on the other side of the island. Blood, like the blood he had taken from them all, the blood of his angel women, the blood he had taken inside himself. You can't eat a hand, it's too bony, but you can eat blood and find it good. He chased the apparition but it was gone, running away through the woods. So he finished his business, but what do you do then? It is inexorable. One leads to two and finally to many. Maybe if it had not been for this town he would have been okay, and Karla would have been the one, long-ago Karla, back when everything happened for the first time. But if the land wants you to renew its power you have no option but to comply, and when your beloved discovers your secret one night there can only be one conclusion to the situation, and then you are trapped in the burning shell of a life with your own little girl terrified of you…

'I don't understand,' he said, racked with shivers as shock began to set in. His face was pale, slicked with cold sweat, contorted with whatever it was he could not comprehend. 'I told her about the storms. I made her feel better. I loved her. But I still did what I did. I just don't understand.'