The Hollower (17 page)

“What made you change your mind?” There was a muffled grunt of effort, like Erik was doing something while the phone was pressed against his ear. Getting dressed, maybe. Dave thought he heard a snap of clothing and what might have been the
zifvt
of a zipper being pulled.

“A lot has happened in the last day or so. I’ll explain it all tonight. Thing is, I think you had something, about us standing a better chance together than alone.” His hand slid back and forth in small arcs across the steering wheel and a pause stretched across the phone between them.

Erik broke the silence with “It isn’t ever going to leave us alone, is it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What time do you want to meet?”

Dave checked the clock on the dashboard. “It’s almost ten thirty now. Can I pick you up at eleven?”

“Works for me.” Erik gave him directions, which he scribbled in pen on the only surface available in the car—an old Dunkin’ Donuts foam cup.

“Got it.” He put the directions in the cup holder.

“Dave?”

“Yeah?” Dave switched ears.

“Thank you, man.”

Dave didn’t know why these people were grateful. He couldn’t protect them. He wasn’t even sure what he hoped to accomplish by bringing them together. “You’re welcome,” he muttered. “See you at eleven.” Then he clicked off the phone.

He saw another flash of light in the trees and frowned, peering out into the darkness. A moment
later, a deer stepped onto the road, and he let out a short breath.

Despite the glare of Dave’s taillights as he pulled away, another flash of white went unseen, followed by a looming of black against the shadows, both so intense as to be almost iridescent.

The chattering of claws echoed softly across the lake.

DeMarco drummed the pencil against the side of the desk as she perused her notes on the Kohlar woman’s case, chewed on the eraser, then drummed again.

Something wasn’t clicking.

Three of her most recent files and two cold case files that instinct had compelled her to pull from the boxes in the basement lay spread out before her. Lakehaven Police Department had been for some time “in the process of converting the contents of the cold cases to electronic format for reference and storage,” but truth be told, the project was an organizational nightmare and had stalled several times since ’96. It had taken her a good three hours to find what she was looking for. As she sat with the reports and photographs and witness statements fanned out over the small space she’d cleared on her desk, she frowned.

How could the cases possibly be related?

DeMarco would have chalked up statements made by Mrs. Saltzman as mostly hazy, useless products of her condition, except that some of them rang familiar in her ear. The old woman indicated that a person unknown had taken Ms. Kohlar from
the hospital. She had also said this person could “steal voices.” Maybe someone who could do impressions, like a comedian or a ventriloquist. Not too strange a detail, in itself. But it nagged her, reminded her vaguely of Cheryl Duffy’s case days before. That woman mentioned someone lurking around her house, someone who appeared to be able to throw his voice and call her by name.

Then there was the face thing. Mrs. Saltzman said this person who had kidnapped Ms. Kohlar had taken her to “a place where they don’t need faces.” Ms. Duffy insisted the figure she saw hadn’t had a face. Both seemed to believe this figure wished to do harm. And yet subsequent investigations of the premises had turned up no trace, no evidence of this figure ever having been there at all.

It nagged at her, too, that Mrs. Saltzman believed Dave Kohlar—she checked her notes—would understand these things or be familiar with them somehow. The old woman thought he should have known about this place where people didn’t need faces. It would have been easy to dismiss the assumption if it wasn’t for his reaction, and his voice.

And the doctor—Stevens’s name sparked some recognition, although it had taken her most of the car ride back to the station to place why. Stevens had counseled Max Feinstein, too, and prescribed narcotics.

All of it tenuously connected by leaps of instinct. Except when she added the info from the Feinstein suicide.

It had been ruled a suicide by the M.E., but DeMarco hadn’t needed Heddy Blickman to tell her that. She and the other investigating officers
thought it odd at the time that there had been no note, but after talking with his ex-wife, DeMarco learned Feinstein attended group therapy sessions and took (or more accurately, according to the inventory of pills and the prescription date, did
not
take) heavy medication.

Max Feinstein saw Dr. Stevens, and he ended up taking out the back of his skull. Sally Kohlar saw Dr. Stevens and disappeared from a psychiatric ward of a hospital.

Was Stevens responsible somehow in either instance? Was that, under the guise of strict doctor-patient privilege, the reason why he hadn’t wanted her to talk to the old woman? But then, if he was the mysterious figure in question, why hadn’t Mrs. Saltzman recognized him? She appeared to know him well enough when they’d questioned her—in fact, seemed to hold the opinion of him that DeMarco herself did.

And further, why wouldn’t Sally have recognized her own doctor, if that was the case? What could he have done to make Sally suddenly afraid of him, and what purpose would that serve if he was looking to get her out quickly and quietly, beneath the staff nurses’ noses? In fact, why remove Sally from the facility at all?

So many questions. So many tenuous connections.

DeMarco realized at length that these connections were more or less secondary to the stranger one, the one that had been sitting on her desk a few mornings ago when she had come in. Brindman & Symmes, attorneys for the estate of Mr. Maxwell Feinstein, had sent her the original copy of a tape that had recently come into their possession. The police
hadn’t found it because it hadn’t been marked as anything special, nor had it been with the other tapes. She suspected it was an oversight on the part of Rubelli’s boys, and DeMarco was still fuming about it days later. But given his condition, even watching the tape hadn’t meant much to the Feinstein case. He had mentioned some being, some kind of thing he called the Hollower.

But given the developments of the more recent cases, the things Feinstein said took on a whole new light.

“
It collects identities and voices at will and uses them against you
.” That’s what Feinstein said on the tape. This Hollower collected voices and used them. Just like Ms. Duffy claimed her bar intruder had done. Just like Mrs. Saltzman claimed Sally Kohlar’s kidnapper had done. And DeMarco had a growing certainty that the “Dave” Feinstein addressed on the tape—the intended recipient of his suicide video—was, in fact, Mr. Dave Kohlar. Symmes had confirmed it over the phone.

The cases looked as if they were tied to Feinstein. A suicide, a disappearance, a possible stalking.

And the murders. The cold case murders.

Debbie Henshaw from Plainfield had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and stomach, and most of the skin of her face had been removed. Her eyes had been gouged out as well, and the sockets filled with the ashes of burnt paper. That one had always bothered DeMarco. Her first homicide as a detective, but far from her first homicide, it had gotten under her skin, so to speak, because the vic was so young. DeMarco had seen a picture of the girl’s face once she’d been identified, and the girl had a sweet
look—innocent good-girl pretty. Freckles across a tiny nose. Someone’s kid sister. Someone’s high school sweetheart.

Someone carved one jagged word into the pale skin beneath her breasts: hollow. At the time, DeMarco and her partner suspected it represented the killer’s belief about Debbie’s soul, her person, saying she was hollow inside, a shell without life and so there was no guilt or wrong in ending the shell’s existence on this earth.

Now DeMarco wasn’t so sure. Feinstein’s faceless Hollower possessed awfully coincidental similarities. Even its name suggested uncanny coincidence.

The second case equally unsettled, in its own way. Not that any murder wasn’t unsettling if she thought about it too long, but she didn’t. She couldn’t afford to. She wasn’t getting paid to be derailed by sentiment.

In the second case, a neighbor found a woman named Savannah Carrington dead on her back patio with several shards of glass in her neck, arms, torso, and legs. Her death might have been ruled a suicide if not for the impossible odd angles of some of the shards. The police searched the premises and the yards of the surrounding properties and found nothing with a broken glass surface that might have accounted for her condition. However, small shards lay scattered about her and were also fished from her in-ground swimming pool. She slumped against the sliding glass door, her nightgown splattered with blood. More blood collected in sticky little puddles around her. The door against which her bloody cheek was pressed was intact; the glass hadn’t come from there, either. In fact, it had provided a surface
for her to write a message about the one part of her body that was unscathed.

My face
. They thought she had written that after the killer had left, as she slowly bled to death in her backyard. Whoever killed Savannah Carrington (“
for Chrissakes, Detective, he didn’t have a face
”) gave her the impression that for some reason he wanted to disfigure her.

DeMarco stared at the photo, at the dried drops of blood on the glass, at the wide-eyed glazed look of horror even death could not relax. She looked at the skinned head of Debbie Henshaw’s corpse, and the blood-speckled wall behind the collapsed body of Max Feinstein. She thought of the ever-widening ripples of sadness, bitterness, loss, and mistrust that these deaths brought to family, friends, colleagues. In essence, all murder victims shared a common injustice. All grieving relatives shared a common pain. All of society shared a loss—of its members, its security and safety, its understanding of itself.

She sighed, rubbed her eyes, then let her gaze trail over the walls of the department. Most of the desk lights were off and only two other officers remained, poring over cases of their own. Behind one was a map of the Morris/Sussex County area.

She rose slowly. Scooping up the files, she made her way over to the map and found Feinstein’s house. Then the Kohlar residence. Then the Duffy residence. Then the homes of the two cold case vics.

More ripples, with Feinstein’s house in the center and the other properties forming rings around it spreading outward.

“Late night for you too, An?”

DeMarco smiled down at Bennie Mendez. “Hey,
Bennie. Yeah, late night for me. But I get my most genius deductions done after hours. Going to make a phone call, then go home and rest this brilliant mind.”

He smiled up at her. “Your modesty rivals only your beauty, Detective.”

DeMarco laughed. “See you in the morning.”

“Night, genius.”

DeMarco turned and walked back to her desk. Picking up the phone, she rang up the district attorney. “May? Anita here. I think I’m going to need a warrant for the Feinstein place . . . Yup, I’ll bring the files over tomorrow morning . . . Right, right. Thanks, May. I appreciate it. Night. . . . Yeah, you too. See you tomorrow.”

She closed the files and tucked them into a relatively neat stack, then grabbed her keys and called it a night.

The last of the regulars had cleared out of the Tavern by a quarter after eleven. Cheryl kept glancing at the clock as she finished wiping down the bar. She hoped someone, anyone—even Ray Gravelin, for Chrissakes—would wait until closing time with her. Dave wouldn’t be there for another twenty-five minutes or so, and she really didn’t want to be alone.

Ray stumbled out at a quarter to midnight, and took the last of the barfly warmth and camaraderie with him.

She remembered the voice at the bar, not quite male and not quite female, but somehow a chilling strain of each intertwined.

Cheryl realized that for a long time it had been with her, watching her, close to her ear, a chill breath
on her neck not like any breath of this earth. It moved freely in her private places, in her safe spaces, and had for months. It invaded her life, her mind, her sense of security. It wasn’t the first time.

“
It was tall, broad like a man, but the way it moved
. . .”

Cheryl crossed the bar to the dining area. She began to place the chairs upside down on the tables, her ear tuned to the silence of the bar, listening for disruptions in the after-hours hum of the bar’s appliances.

As she upended the last of the chairs, it came to her soft and unobtrusive—the tinkling music of wind chimes.

She straightened and turned, and found she was no longer in the bar.

At least, not in the Olde Mill Tavern that she knew. The oblong shape of the bar rotted, its rough wood waterlogged and stinking now of lake things left to decompose—dead fish, decaying seaweed, baby doll arms floating in the shallow pools close to the shore . . .

Baby doll arms? That had been long ago, too far in the past. A past long gone. A past as hazy as the fog that settled low around the now-rotted hull where night after night she served drinks to leering men who talked to her breasts and then went home and tucked their little girls in and swore to protect them from men who might tempt them with dolls.

She blinked hard. When she opened her eyes, the bar remained, but she could see more of where she stood. She felt the warm grainy texture of sand between her toes and the slight tug of early sunburn across the backs of her bare shoulders. The white legs of the lifeguard stand reached up into the sun
glare. From the crossbeam by one of them, the metal chimes knocked around in the midsummer breeze. All around her the sun was dazzling, but she saw a stretch of beach before her and heard the lapping of water against the gray-green wood of the dock a ways out.

Cheryl stepped backward and cool water splashed the backs of her legs. She cried out, turning in the water. The shimmer of sunlight hazed the world beyond the dock, a far shore lost now, if even a far shore existed out there.