BLUE MERCY (41 page)

Where the hell were they? She couldn’t focus.

When he shoved her through the door, he said something, but she couldn’t decipher his words. There was a buzzing in her ears, like a swarm of hornets. He flipped some switches, and lights blinded her. Her throat constricted.

Then he was dragging her, shuffling as he supported her weight. The hornets droned louder, and her lungs felt heavy. She knew this place, but didn’t. And when he lowered her, she recognized the smell.
What was it?

She slumped to the floor, the tiles cold against her cheek. She watched his black Reebok sneakers as he crossed the room several times. In and out of her line of vision. What the fuck was he doing? And then Kay heard water running. Crashing into a tub or a basin, drowning out the hornets in her head.

When he returned, his shirt was off, his skin pale. Trails of light and movement swirled around him, as if a dozen Billy Coombses were coming at her.
Keep your eyes open. Focus
.

She tried to scream, but nothing came out. She wanted to throw up.

His hands wormed beneath her shoulders, grasping her under her arms. The room did a somersault, and she swallowed bile. He was dragging her, grunting and cursing as he did. Then he was tugging at her clothes.

The crash of water amplified, then she felt it—warm and swirling. For a moment she thought he’d stripped her completely, then felt her blouse plaster to her ribs.

When she tried to focus, reality seemed to shift. Light and color changed. She thought of Patricia Hagen.
So this was what it was like?
The embrace of the water, the lull of her own heartbeat in her head, her muscles slackening as the drug flooded her veins.

Her body was numb now. There was only warmth as the water rose around her. Kay wondered if she’d even feel it when he cut her. An easy death. Quiet. Almost peaceful in a way, as the drug annulled any instinct for survival.

And then Kay saw the knife. Small, fitting into his palm. The honed blade trailed reflected light through the air. Dancing before her face.

He lowered it and she saw his smile. Saw his lips move, but the words were lost. There was only the roar of water. And her heart.

She felt him pull at her blouse, and the smooth sweep of the knife as he cut the material away.

When she blinked, she saw Valley. Spencer. Their bodies. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be. Maybe this was
her
death and she should accept it. Accept that fate had, at last, delivered her justice.

“No, you don’t.”

Were they Coombs’s words or her own? When she opened her eyes he was a blur over her, one moment his eyes in focus, the next his mouth. Everything shifting.

“Don’t you go down so easy.” She read the words off his lips. He wanted a fight. Wanted to see her struggle.

She wouldn’t give him the pleasure.

Close your eyes, Delaney.
But she couldn’t. Like a voyeur at her own death, she was drawn to the violence of it. When Coombs brought the knife to her neck, she sensed the blade caress her throat but didn’t feel its slice. Then she recognized the heat of her own blood leaking out, staining the water.

“… should have shot you when I had the chance,” Coombs said. “You were so far gone. Probably don’t even remember me being there, do you?”

“That night on Bernie’s lawn, you grabbed on to his leg like a fucking pit bull. So where’s your spit and fire now, huh? Give me some of that fight.”

He shoved her, and her innards jostled deep inside her.

“I should have shot you. Your own gun too. I should have pulled the trigger just like I did on your partner. Do you know what he said before he died? Do you?”

Kay swallowed. Fighting the drug. Battling the assault of colors and light, the urge to vomit.

“Abso-fucking-lutely nothing. The son of a bitch cried. Blubbering in his own blood. Chickenshit cop couldn’t even face his own death.”

She wanted to say something, but couldn’t remember how to form the words. She wanted to struggle but knew her body would only disappoint her. Her auditory bandwidth narrowed, and the blood slowed in her veins. She listened to the air fill her lungs.

“But
you
will,” she heard him say as he unzipped his chinos. “You’ll look death right in the eye, won’t you?” His words whispered in her ear, his steely breath washing over her. And as reality dissolved, Kay wondered if she’d at last find peace.

FINN CAME DOWN HARD
on the accelerator. The Lumina surged up the base of the JFX, the tires thudding over the joints of the Gay Street viaduct, hurtling north.

It was the attendant at the city garage just down from Headquarters who had answered Kay’s cell phone. The kid had found it ringing under Kay’s 4Runner and described for Finn the dark-colored sedan that had left the structure shortly after he remembered seeing Kay come in.

Less than a block from fucking Police Headquarters
.

Finn had ordered a patrol to check on Kay’s apartment, then warned the units covering Eales’s house and Hagen’s and put out an APB on Coombs’s maroon Park Avenue. Then Finn had been mobile, powered by hundred-proof adrenaline.

As the Lumina blasted past the State Pen, the speedometer’s needle inched to seventy-five. Finn grappled under the seat for the cherry and threw it on the dash. He didn’t know where else to go. He radioed the Northern, ordered more units to 311 Keystone, and demanded they patch through the stationed uniforms to him. Backup would arrive before he did, but if Kay was in that house … His mind flashed on the images of Beggs’s and Hagen’s drained, nude bodies, and his foot came down harder on the gas.

The radio blurted, and a Northern District officer came on.

“I’m on my way but I want you and your partner to go in,” Finn instructed the uniform. “Front and back. I need that house secured.”

“We’re moving in.”

“And keep this channel open. Take me with you.”

Finn cranked the police radio’s volume: car doors slammed, then silence, and finally banging. He focused on traffic, but in his mind he was hammering on the door of 311 with them.

The radio hissed. The banging grew louder. Then: “No answer, Detective, and there’s no lights on inside.”

“Take the door,” he said into the radio.

But even as he listened across the airwaves to the battering on 311’s door, Finn knew there was only a slim chance that Coombs would risk returning to the rental house.

Baltimore was Coombs’s hunting ground. Kay had said it was because he knew the streets. Because it was where he felt safe. In control.

Where he felt safe
. As safe as he’d probably felt in his dead mother’s embrace.

The Lumina’s wheels almost locked when Finn’s foot punched the brake. The vehicle squealed onto the North Avenue off-ramp.

“I know where you feel safe, you son of a bitch.” And as he careened into southbound traffic, Finn prayed his hunch was right.

KAY HAD NEVER KNOWN
such absolute calm.

There was nothing familiar about this place, yet there was comfort here. Time converged into a fourth dimension where past, present, and future were the same. The images came at her in waves. Bernard’s lawn. Spencer’s blood. Harris the cat. Hagen’s nude body in the leaves. Finn’s face when he came inside her.

And then there was Valley. The girl sat on the bare mattress in her apartment, boxes and secondhand furniture surrounding her. She laughed at something, the shyness and mistrust gone.

“This is your future,” Kay had told the girl. “You can’t change your past, but the future …you can make something of it.”

Valley stood, settled a hand against Kay’s cheek, and she felt its warmth. Then Valley dissolved.

Kay turned, looking for the girl, but the room was gone as well. She was someplace else. No ground, no walls, no horizon. Just a churning gray. Then Spencer. There was a light behind him, and she squinted against it. He wore one of his brown, off-the-rack sport coats. The kind that always made cops look like cops—the cuffs frayed, and a patch worn bare above his right hip from years of covering the butt of his nine. His tie was lopsided.

“But you’re dead.” The words formed in her mind.

Spence was gone.

Kay spun. Searching. The light grew brighter. Pure and white. And he was back, sitting at his desk across from hers in Headquarters, his loafers propped on the corner.

“I killed you,” she said.

“Bullshit. Only person you killed was yourself. Don’t go all Mother Teresa on me, Delaney. Martyrdom never suited you.”

The light pulsed behind him, and then he stood before her: uniform crisply pressed, stripes pinned to his lapel, and his cap under his arm. Just as they’d buried him.

“And now look at you. Ready to throw in the towel. What the fuck are you doing?” She heard his voice, but his mouth didn’t move. Were they her own words?

“You’re a fucking good cop. You figured this bastard.
You
. Are you gonna let this shit-for-brains win?”

Then he was at the wheel of their Lumina, cigarette smoke curling around him. “Everything I taught you, and you’re gonna throw it away on this little dickwad?”

The word
absolution
moved through her thoughts, felt as if it entered her body. As if she could taste its sound.

“The only person who needs to forgive you is you.”

The light pulsed weaker this time.

Redemption came to her in a flash of brilliant blue.

“You’re a good cop, Delaney.”

She hovered in the blue-gray, searching. But Spence was gone. Another voice beckoned her now. Hot in her ear. Words distorted.

The water swirled, and when she opened her eyes, the light hurt. A shadow moved, and Kay struggled not to react. Coombs was over her, in the water with her.

What had he done to her? Why wasn’t she dead?

Her pulse pounded against the bite of rope on her wrists. He’d secured her arms back, over her head, muscles stretched, rope taut so she wouldn’t slip beneath the water. She watched Coombs’s lips move, but still the words were a garble in her ears.

When she felt his hand, she refused to flinch. She let his fingers crawl down her neck, her chest, and finally grasp one breast through her sheer bra. He squeezed it hard, and she guessed there should be more pain.

She heard him moan.

She wanted to spit at him, to scream something, but her mouth couldn’t form the words. He smiled, as though sensing her attempt. His Adam’s apple lifted and fell several times as he swallowed, and the heat of his shirtless body pressed against her.

And then Kay knew what she had to do.

She held his stare, the blue eyes boring down on her, closer and closer.
Come on, you sick son of a bitch. Just another
inch.
She could feel his cheek against hers, smell his breath. His hair tickled her forehead as he inhaled her. And Kay could see his heartbeat pulse through the artery along his neck.

In her mind, Kay lunged then. Her teeth sank into his soft flesh like a dog and ripped out his throat as the hot blood from his lacerated carotid poured over her.

But with a thin, pitiful cry, her body failed her. Her deflated muscles only quivered in an attempt to respond to the electrochemical signals firing through her brain, the drug severing any connection.

Still, Coombs backed off. Inches only, but enough that she could see his eyes. And in them she recognized his understanding, his comprehension of what she’d hoped to accomplish. His thin smile stretched across his face.

ROACH HEARD SOMETHING
bang upstairs. A second and a third bang. Then silence.

No doubt neighborhood kids looking for a cheap thrill. The funeral home was locked up, a couple windows boarded already. Still, the little thugs would snatch up anything that wasn’t nailed down if the Realtor didn’t close on it soon.

Lucky for him old man Hagen hadn’t removed the spare key stashed over the delivery-bay door. Thirty minutes ago when he’d stepped into the basement, Roach had bathed in the sweet familiarity. The smells, the quiet, the calm lingering of death.

He remembered the first time Bernard had snuck him
down here and dared him to touch one of the stiffs. He’d thought of his mother then, as he’d touched the cold, gray flesh.

He would come after school whenever Bernard worked late and sit upstairs in one of the viewing rooms, staring across a sea of empty folding chairs at some fancy casket with a stuffed body. The whole formality of death had always seemed obscene to him.

The embalming room made the most sense, even at that young age. There were no lies here, among the steel tables and the mortician’s instruments. Bernard had shown him some of the equipment once: the Porti-boy embalming pump, the drainage instruments, and the trocar—a two-foot-long metal shaft, tipped with a razor-sharp point and connected by a rubber hose to an aspirator. His brother had explained how Hagen used it to suck out the cavity fluids, to perforate and empty each of the major abdominal organs, sucking it all out like a puree. Roach had always wanted to watch. Just once.

As he looked down at Delaney now, he toyed with the notion.
Maybe later
. Other tasks had to be completed first. The ketamine would be wearing off, and not soon enough. He should have shot her up with less, should have guessed she’d be more susceptible to the drug. Cop had probably been clean all her life.

For now, only her eyes moved. He relished the panic he saw there in spite of her attempts to mask it. It was what lay behind that panic that excited him the most. Delaney’s old fire. The spark he’d seen in her on Bernard’s lawn. That’s what gave him a hard-on now.