The Judas Child (36 page)

Ali accepted the proffered jewelry and turned it over in her hand. The circular opening was very small, but the silver was in a broad, flat design, and it was heavy in her hand. “I guess it’s possible. But this would be the largest thing he ever took. If this was all she had on her, but you—”

“I know. I read the list of Susan’s personal effects. There was a religious medal around her neck. So he should have taken that before he took the bracelet, right?”

Ali nodded. They both knew Susan was still wearing the medal when they found her body.

“There was something else,” said Rouge. “I gave Susan an ankle chain when I left for military school. She wore it every day, but under her sock, so no one else would know about it. That’s what she said in her letters—that’s the way she put it. The chain was thin, very fragile, with a small engraved oval of gold.”

“Then that’s the trophy. If you find the anklet, you’ll find the man who killed her.”

“You wouldn’t actually need the ankle chain to find him,” said Arnie Pyle. He had crept into their space.

Ali glared at the agent to say,
Bad boy
. “He’s right, Rouge. You only need to find a man who knew she wore it. Unless she told someone in the family ora—”

“Even my parents didn’t know. It was just between us.”

Ali imagined the delicate chain on the small ankle of a ten-year-old girl, a tiny secret beneath a white sock, gleaming warm against her skin, something her twin had given her with the sweet love of a child. She could see Susan’s murderer taking it out every night and using it to relive the violation and the murder. Perhaps he masturbated when he held it.

 

Buddy Sorrel parked his car by the access road. He walked down the long driveway to the lake house, looking to his right and left for signs of mushrooms. According to the tax assessor’s aerial photographs, there was no atrium on this property. The BCI investigator felt like a fool wasting his time here, but the captain had made him the official mushroom man, and all the details of fungus were now his province.

Maybe he should call out a patrol car to help him search the woods for a grower’s shed. The trees could hide such a structure from the tax office aerial photographs.

No, scratch that idea. The captain wouldn’t like it if he tipped this lead to one of the uniforms. And even with a hundred state troopers, he wouldn’t find the elusive truffle in a search above ground. That particular fungus would be hiding in the earth, possibly keeping company with a small corpse. However, oaks were plentiful along this private road, and Dr. Mortimer Cray, amateur botanist, had claimed the roots of these trees were vital to the growth of truffles. Could a dog sniff them out? The Canine Corps could sniff out explosives—why not truffles?

What was he going to accomplish here? Probably nothing. Three local cops had searched the house, and evidence of two kids could not have escaped them. But the loose ends must be tied.

After clearing a bend of evergreen trees, he could see the entire ramble of the house, a sprawling bastard thing of wooden walls joining brick ones and linking to a common plane of rough stone four stories high. He hung back by the trees and stared up at the fourth floor. There was a bit of white material sticking out from the sash of a closed window, waving in the breeze like a nagging three-dimensional metaphor for the despicable, intolerable loose end.

He walked up the flagstone path to the back door. The property seal was fixed to the door frame. On closer inspection, he knew the adhesive material had been peeled back and replaced several times.

Well, that could be kids. In his younger days as a beat cop, he had spent a lot of nights routing teenagers out of the damndest places.

He reached up to the ledge over the door and found the key where the local police chief had left it. However, Chief Croft could not be sure that he had actually bothered to lock the door. According to the chief, some older residents of Makers Village didn’t even own keys to their original turn-of-the-century locks.

Sorrel ripped off the tape and tried the knob. The door opened with ease. He walked into the kitchen, which should have been on the other side of the house, for the back doors were usually lakeside. He looked around at the dust settling on stacks of mushroom cookbooks at the center of the kitchen table. And on the wall was a clock in the shape of a common toadstool. Too bad Costello had held this aspect back from the uniforms. He could have sent a trooper on this wild-goose chase.

Sorrel headed for the stairs, mindful of the shifting directions as he climbed a twisting route toward the fourth floor, where he had seen the white material sticking out at him like a tongue. When he entered the bedroom at the top of the stairs, he knew there was something wrong with the floor plan. Well, a lot was wrong with it, given the careless architecture of the house and all its add-ons. But one thing troubled him: there was no window where he expected to see one. He stepped back into the hall to get his bearings by the window at the end of the corridor. Odd. He returned to the corner bedroom. Only one of its walls had windows.

And now he noted a rectangle of brighter wallpaper next to the large armoire, and this large, light patch was shaped with the wardrobe’s rounded corners. So the heavy piece of furniture had been recently moved. He reached around the back of it, but his hand would not fit into the narrow crack of space between the wood and the wall. He rocked the armoire on its front legs, intending to slide it to one side, but it toppled to the hardwood floor. Riding over the sound of the crash, he thought he heard a car engine out in the yard. But the door behind the armoire had his full attention.

When he turned the knob, the door would not open. And now the old house suddenly became miles more interesting. This door was locked, while the downstairs door was open to any tramp who happened by. The wood panel was solid construction, and he was not about to break his foot trying to kick it in. He wrestled with the weight of the toppled armoire and moved it out of his way. Once he had space enough to maneuver, he put all his strength behind the twist of the knob to force the metal lock. It was an old mechanism, and it broke easily. The door opened onto a large bathroom with a second armoire pulled out from a window. A loop of knotted sheet dangled from the windowsill. One end was caught in the sash, and the other end was tied to a back leg of the wardrobe. And now he saw the remnants of a cot, its crumpled canvas and broken slats.

Somewhere beyond this room, he thought he heard the creak of wood. He stood very still. Then he heard it again. Something stirred on the floor below, or was it on the stairs? He stopped to listen for a few seconds more, but heard no further noise.

Well, old houses had old bones; their joints gave in to every breeze and creaked with the motion. And these centenarians were not airtight, but breathed in and out. He decided it was only the wind, nothing more.

He was reaching for his cell phone to call for the troopers when his eyes focused on something else. Sorrel knelt down beside the discarded cot canvas. He plucked up one long blond strand of baby-fine hair and held it up to the light—so delicate, so bright.

The strand of gold was the last thing he ever saw; the blow to the back of his head was that swift, that sure.

 

Minutes had passed since they heard the car engine pulling up to the house. Gwen carried the stack of journals, moving slowly, awkwardly.

“Help me, Sadie.” She deposited her load on the countertop and limped out of the white room and down the wide aisle of tables toward the trees. “We’ve got to put everything back the way it was. If he sees this mess—” And now she stopped, dismayed. Too many bits of the dummy’s head and torso lay within the dog-chain circle. An unholy mess was this body of an artificial man.

Where had Sadie gone?

Gwen got down on her knees and stretched out her body. Lying flat on her stomach, she batted the head with the broomstick. The dog held his Sitting Bull pose, but she knew better than to trust him. After she snagged the head, she stared at the rest of the torso beyond her reach, pondering how to recover it. “And all that stuffing.” Gwen could see the shredded bits of the plastic bags strewn everywhere.

“Not enough time to clean up,” said Sadie, appearing beside her. “And it doesn’t matter anymore. When The Fly comes through the door, we’ll put the dog on him.”

“No, the dog’s not ready.”

The dog was waiting on his biscuit. Sadie threw it to him. He leapt into the air and snatched it with amazing speed and sureness. Then he pranced to the limit of his chain, eager for another round of Geronimo and Sitting Bull.

“The dog’s ready. We have to do it now. You need a doctor.”

Gwen held the felt head in her hand, squeezing the material. “No, it’s too soon. We can’t do this.” She slowly sank down to the ground and sat cross-legged, staring at the ceiling until the brilliant light burned her eyes.

Sadie hunkered down beside her. “Why doesn’t he come down?” Now she was also looking at the ceiling. “What do you think he’s doing up there?”

“I don’t think he’s in the house.” She hugged herself with tight-wrapped arms.

“But the car hasn’t pulled out yet.”

How could she explain to Sadie that she could not feel the man anymore. He was somewhere else now, and she was sure of it. So there was more time to clean up the mess. “The dog needs another—”

“Look at me.” Sadie put her hands on Gwen’s shoulders. “You don’t want to do this. You’re the one who isn’t ready, and you never will be. You’re still waiting for someone to come and get us.”

“Okay, you’re right! And you know why? Because it isn’t going to work. This is not a movie. It’s real! He’s not The Fly, Sadie. He’s a real living man. You can’t kill him, you can’t even hurt him. All you can do is give us away.” She gripped her friend’s arm, pleading now. “He’ll be so mad, Sadie. We have to wait till—”

“We can’t wait any longer. Your leg is getting worse all the time.”

Gwen folded up, drawing in her knees, pressing both hands over her ears. She disowned her leg and its darkening flesh, its foul smell. She shut her eyes, until she felt Sadie’s hand on her hair, stroking her, calming her.

“Okay, we’ll put everything back the way it was.” Sadie stood up and walked over the invisible edge of the dog’s circle. She was holding the broom and keeping one eye on the dog. She stretched the broomstick out to the torso and began to nudge it back toward her.

The dog came at her, stealthy, head low to the ground. Surprised, Sadie could only stare, taking slow backward steps, not wanting to turn away from the animal.

“Don’t look directly at him.” Gwen tried to keep the panic from her voice as she crawled to the edge of the circle, making no sudden movements to set off the animal. “When you look at him, he takes that as a challenge. Stand sideways and look at me.”

Too late—there was a light in the animal’s eyes, a hint of something crafty from out of the woods, out of the wild. His muscles were bunching, tensing. And now he was almost in flight, running fast. Sadie thrust out the broom handle. The dog stopped short, taking the wood pole in his teeth and splintering it as he dragged it backward and Sadie with it. She dropped the handle and ran back to the edge of the circle, just ahead of the dog’s snapping teeth.

Sadie stood beyond the dog’s reach and watched him straining at his chain, wanting to get at her. She was shaking.

Gwen slowly got to her feet, crying and yelling at once. “You see? You don’t know what you’re doing!” And now the wounded leg failed her. She fell to the dirt and lay there, pounding the ground with one closed fist. “It won’t work! Can’t you
see
that? The dog won’t hold a pose.” She was screaming now. “He’ll rush the man before he gets a chance to prop the door open. Then when the man figures out what we did—”Her voice was lower, full of anger and frustration. “Then he’s going to hurt us
really bad
, Sadie. It’s stupid, just
stupid
to think this is going to work.”

Sadie looked as though she had just been slapped by her best friend. Her face was white. “I’m sorry.” The child’s voice was smaller now, almost a whisper, and her eyes were full of hurt. “I’m doing the best I can.”

 

Christmas Eve services were being held in the prison chapel, but Paul Marie was not in attendance. He stared out the window at the gray walls of an air shaft.

His most constant visitor had been inadvertently amusing tonight. At the end of their hour together, Father Domina had wished him a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year. The elderly priest had detected no irony in the prisoner’s sudden hilarity. The good old man had even taken great pleasure in Paul Marie’s tears as they rolled down the laughing man’s face.

Years ago, Jane Norris had also been a steady visitor. Their old love had become corrupted over time, but not entirely dispensed with, not on every level. He still had dreams about her body, but not her soul.

At his trial, she had seen it as her Christian duty to stand up in a public courtroom and tell every detail of their teenage couplings, the exact number of penetrations—not how many times they had made love. In her sworn testimony, it had seemed very important to Jane that she had been his first—penetration.

For ten years, she had visited the prison, faithfully, religiously, using her allotted time to pray aloud for his soul, murdering it with each dryly uttered word of forgiveness for every act of love. Jane had never married, never taken another lover. She had become rather like an insane nun in her devotions to his salvation.

Five years ago, she had died by her own hand, and he sometimes wondered if it had been a sane act done in her only lucid moment of the decade. Perhaps toward the end of her life, unlike Father Domina, Jane had finally grasped irony—and then put her head in that oven.

Other people had replaced her in the visitors’ room, most of them policemen wanting to close old homicide cases with similar characteristics. And every two years, a different FBI agent would come by to chat for an hour and then go away with nothing for his trouble. The priest was far from lonely.