Eden's Eyes (24 page)

Cass lit a cigarette, the pause deliberate.

"Then this newsbreak comes on and you see a house that looks like the one in your dream—"

"It was the same house," Karen protested, in spite of her desire for a sane explanation. "Exactly."

"See what I mean?" Cass poked the side of her head with a rigid finger. "Tricks! Do you know how many little white bungalows there are in a city the size of Ottawa? Thousands, probably. You and I drove past I don't know how many of them in the past two weeks. Little wonder you dreamed about one of 'em.

"Anyway, the point I'm getting at is this: Your dream was horrible, it got to you so deeply that when the reporter came on the TV and started talking about a similar situation—and that's all it could be, babe, just a similar situation—your tired, frightened mind said 'Holyjesusfuck that's the same house! It's the same house and it's the same kid!'" She shrugged, smiling sympathetically. "But how could it be?"

"Yes. How could it be?

Karen's conviction began to dissolve in the solvent of Cass's common-sense argument. Her mind, opting for the sake of its own integrity to ignore its perceptions, clung to Cass's words like gospel.

Then she remembered something, an unmistakable detail, and that crazed certainty came galloping back again. Fear ran rampant once more.

"What about the toy? That unicorn? I saw it, I know I did."

Patiently, Cass restructured her point. "It's the same type of thing, kiddo. Mind-tricks. Look, you said it was dark in the room in your dream, right? Karen nodded. "Well what if the kid in your dream was holding a stuffed pink horsey?

Or a bunny, for that matter. And in the dark, who can be sure of color? That's the thing about dreams, see. . ." She dug in her head for an analogy, remembering that for Karen dreams with images were a whole new ball game. "It's like good story. The story-teller supplies hints, suggestions, just enough to set your mind to working. Then your imagination takes over and fills in the rest. That's the subconscious, babe, something few of us have much control over.

"So in your dream the kid held a toy. When you saw the one on TV your imagination just joined the two with an 'equals' sign. That simple."

No! No way! I saw it!

But Karen crushed that voice like a cockroach.

"How did you get so smart?" she said, a hint of a smile quivering on her lips. She had never felt so utterly used-up.

"Corn-fed, kid," Cass said. She slapped Karen's knee and rose to her feet. "Just like you. And after about twenty more hours' sleep, you're gonna see that I'm right."

Sleep.

"I don't want to sleep," Karen objected as Cass drew her up to her feet. "I. . . don't want to dream."

"Think nice thoughts,'' Cass said, leading her upstairs again. "That's the ticket."

But Karen's thoughts were not nice. Not nice at all. Cass spent the next several hours creeping around like a church mouse, doing her best not to waken Karen. After cleaning up the mess in the kitchen, she installed herself on the living-room couch, where she plugged in her headphones and tried to let Elvis croon her worries away.

But she could feel the TV beckoning with its single gray eye, and finally she got up and turned it on. Keeping the volume low, she scanned past the soaps and the game shows until she found the news brief again. It was more detailed this time, providing not only the victim's name but a panoramic view of the rear of the house, and the door through which the killer had entered.

Cass shuddered as she watched, recalling the minute detail with which Karen had described her dream. When the camera pulled back from the kicked-in door to the reporter again, who stood now at the edge of the yard, Cass noticed a kid's swing, and a trike on its side. . .

Hadn't Karen mentioned those things?

And wasn't that kid's name familiar somehow?

Whoa! Cass cautioned herself, getting up to snap off the TV. Whose imagination is running wild now?

But the victim's name stayed with her, and she spent a long while that day caught up in an annoying mind-game of trying to recall where she had heard it before.

Albert dropped by early that afternoon, on his way to a barn sale near. Arnprior. He hadn't seen Karen in days, and Cass guessed that maybe he was feeling a little left out. She explained that Karen had finally O.D.'d on the excitement and was upstairs asleep, recharging her batteries. Albert said he understood, and left a message for Karen to call him if she felt up to it later that evening.

Toward dusk, Cass's concern for her friend, which had been escalating insidiously all day, threatened to spin out of control. Cass didn't have much education—she'd barely squeaked past the ninth grade—but she had a sense for things, a kind of country-folk logic that, by the uninitiated, was often misconstrued as plain pigheadedness. But it was a way of looking at things, of achieving a peaceful coexistence with the world. It was often narrow, certainly unscientific, and generally closed to argument—but it was one which had served numerous generations with backgrounds similar to hers. And right now that sense was bristling with alarm. She'd been so caught up in Karen's joy in the newfound faculty of sight that she'd failed to see what a fine line the girl was now walking. Karen had told her about the guy in Europe who'd lost first his mind and then his new eyes, and understood her apprehensions.

But like it or not, mightn't the same thing be happening to Karen? The dreams were driving her batty—they'd drive anyone batty—and it had long since started to show on her. She was pale, whipped looking, skittish as a colt. . . and now this new bloody horror.

Suddenly intent, Cass got up and strode to the phone in the kitchen. She picked up Karen's green-leather personal directory. . . and then paused, smiling fondly, remembering the night a week ago when Karen had excitedly converted all of the phone numbers on her braille list into digits, then carefully transferred them into this book. . .

And at that point, such a loathsome, traitorous feeling overswept her that she almost dropped the book, putting it down again. Christ, what had she been thinking? She'd been an inch away from calling up that psychiatrist, Dr. Smith, and spilling the whole thing. She loved Karen, but this was not for Cass to decide—not yet at least. If it got much worse then she'd have to. For now, though, better to try and discuss it with Karen, tomorrow maybe, in the good light of a new day.

The phone rang then, and Cass snatched it up quickly, before its harsh jangle could waken Karen. As she brought the receiver to her ear, she recalled Karen mentioning the double-click of someone listening in (she, for one, had no doubt who it was), but on this occasion heard nothing.

"Hello?" Cass said quietly.

"Is this Karen Lockhart?" a harsh female voice inquired.

"N—" Cass started to say.

"He walks, bitch," the voice rasped, and Cass inhaled as if stung. "He walks."

"Who the Christ is this?" Cass bellowed. "Who—?"

But the buzz of the dial tone silenced her.

Chapter 27

Detective-Sergeant Jim Hall got an unofficial autopsy report later that same morning. After completing his preliminary investigations at the scene and relegating certain tedious duties to his junior partner, he camped on the morgue's doorstep until the harried, chain-smoking pathologist confirmed what Jim had already suspected.

"I don't like doing this sort of thing until all of the information is in," the pathologist complained as he unzipped the body bag. "I don't even have the child's medical records yet."

Jim tried to speak without breathing too deeply; he hated morgues, the stink of death veiled in antiseptic.

"Strictly off the record, Dr. Preston," he coaxed gently. "But before I talk to the parents I need some idea of what I'm dealing with here. Anything you can tell me at a glance? The weapon, for instance?"

Begrudgingly, Preston snapped on a pair of mud-brown surgical gloves. He didn't want to do this—it defied strict protocol—but there was something in the quiet, squarely built detective's manner which precluded a negative response. He was grinning, but it was like being grinned at by a rattler.

Reaching up, Preston flicked on a dish-shaped lamp, illuminating in harsh relief regions of human terrain that had never been meant to see light. His breath was a papery wheeze behind his mask as he probed the rent-open corpse.

"No weapon that I can see evidence of," he said before a minute had passed. "At least not grossly. The ragged wound edges suggest tearing as opposed to cutting. And here, on either side of the wound. Finger bruises. Made by rather smallish hands, judging by the spans." He looked up at Jim, whose eyes deliberately skirted the stainless steel table. "Unless the microscopic investigation proves differently, and I don't believe that it will, it's a fair bet that your man did this by hand, Sergeant."

And in that moment, unwillingly, Jim Hall tried to imagine the act, tearing a child in half with his own bare hands. Crawling inside the psychopath's head had always been distressingly easy for Jim. It was an ability—or curse—he'd employed on a number of occasions in New York City to net serial killers, the type who followed bizarre, ritualistic patterns not readily apparent even to the trained observer.

But try as he might, even with his gaze fixed unwaveringly on the horrific result, he was incapable of picturing the act.

He breathed a sigh of relief.

"Anything else?"

The pathologist took hold of the child's left arm, rotating it stiffly at the elbow to reveal the soft inner flesh, fish-belly white and wickedly scarred.

"She was on dialysis. That lumpy mass under the skin is a Dacron shunt. The scarring is the result of repeated operations to replace or de-clot it." He released the arm, and with his fingers widened the margins of the nearly circumferential abdominal wound. "Both of her kidneys have been surgically removed, the right one recently, judging by the freshness of the scar."

Preston skinned off his gloves and lit a smoke, an unfiltered Players. It trembled between his lips.

"Can we get out of here?" Jim said in a whisper. "I need some air."

"Yeah," Preston replied. "Me, too."

He covered the corpse with a transparent draw sheet and snapped off the overhead light. Jim followed him to a book- and file-cluttered office across the hall, where the doctor poured out coffee for them both. Jim enfolded his cup with bloodless fingers.

"I've seen victims of vicious slayings before," he began tentatively. "But. . . I find it hard to imagine the strength it would take to rip a human body in two, even a child's."

"I know what you mean," Preston said, settling uneasily into his seat behind the desk. "Man's very nature dictates a certain belief in personal invulnerability, even in the face of death." He took out a fresh cigarette but didn't light it, aiming it instead at Jim. "A simple for instance—when you accidentally cut your finger, isn't part of your reaction a face-slap kind of surprise? How can I be opened up? This is not possible. The internal me cannot be violated."

Jim reflected on this a moment, then nodded his assent.

"Well, the truth of it is, we're damned easy to open. We both know it, we've both seen it. We just don't want to believe it. A strong man, properly hyped, could easily produce what we just witnessed in there. Using these." He held up his own small hands, still mottled with talcum from the gloves.

Jim finished his coffee in silence, then stood to leave.

"When can I expect a complete report?"

"Call me around four," Preston said. "If there's more to tell you, I'll have it by then."

Following a thorough going-over by the on-call neurologist, Mary Bleeker was admitted to the psych ward at the Ottawa General Hospital. Jim spoke first with the attending psychiatrist, an earnest, chestnut-skinned East Indian with a thick accent, who filled him in on the woman's condition.

"She is suffering a mild concussion from the blow she was receiving in the forehead, but this is not elucidating her present state of stupor."

He went on to explain in that same lilting verse that Mary Bleeker was catatonic, her mind temporarily—or quite possibly permanently—jammed into neutral. The condition was psychological, but in the acute phase it rendered the psyche as impenetrable as a Brink's van. It was as if all the major circuit boards of a complex computer had been suddenly and critically dislodged, leaving only that single green eye staring blankly out. Jim had seen it before and knew how pointless questioning her would be.

Still, he had to try.

He found her propped against a mound of pillows in an ill-lit private room, breathing raspily, her gray eyes afloat in their sockets. She blinked only infrequently, and each time she did a spasm shattered her otherwise vapid face. In the corner by the curtained window, overlit by a pale reading lamp, the child's father sat limply, looking almost a battleworn as his estranged wife. He gazed with lidded eyes at Mary, seeming not to notice Jim as the detective stepped into the room. He started violently when Jim cleared his throat.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bleeker," Jim said somberly. He introduced himself and sat in the chair opposite. "I know this is a very bad time, but there are questions I need to ask you. Whoever did this to your daughter is still out there."

Bob Bleeker's eyes reddened, but he nodded grimly. Straightening, he stole one last glance at Mary before shifting his attention to Jim. Pale and prematurely balding, he had the nimble fingers and neatly coiffed look of a beautician. Out of habit, Jim guessed his occupation: a barber.

"What can I tell you?" Bleeker asked shakily.

"Let's start at the beginning," Jim said sympathetically. "Tell me what happened from the moment you arrived at the house."

A half hour later Jim Hall was hurrying out of the room to find a telephone, his guts curling into new knots of horror. At virtually the same instant he had finished his interrogation of the father, Mary Bleeker had shot bolt upright in bed and begun screeching her daughter's name at the top of her lungs. Within seconds the room was transformed into a sinking island of chaos, nurses and orderlies struggling to subdue the grief-maddened woman, while a weeping and guilt-stricken Bob Bleeker did his best to defend her. She was screaming still.