The Vanishing (7 page)

And this neighborhood was rough.

She’d known it even before leaving the office, but it was confirmed when two police cars roared past them a few blocks from Holly’s last-known address, sirens on, lights flashing, both coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the street, four officers jumping out, weapons drawn.

Jan quickly turned onto another street. ‘‘Maybe we should head back,’’ she suggested. ‘‘We can come here tomorrow.’’

It was the logical thing to do. And, in the grand scheme of things, what difference did a day make? Still, Carrie felt a strong, almost compulsive need to continue on. ‘‘How close is Holly’s place?’’

‘‘Two or three blocks.’’

‘‘That’s far enough away, isn’t it? If we come from the side or the back and stay off that street?’’

‘‘There’s no guarantee she still lives there. Or that she’s even home.’’

Carrie held up the tabloid photo.

Jan sighed. ‘‘All right, you’re right. I need to know, too.’’

They parked on the side of the three-story tenement building, alongside graffiti that seemed to be a list of gang members’ nicknames:
Shorty
.
Big Boy
.
Daddy
.
Cupid
. On the sidewalk, against the wall, a skinny black man lay in a fetal position, only the twitching of his feet indicating that he was still alive. From the distance came the sound of sirens and, closer in, gunfire.

Jan reached into her handbag before opening the car door. ‘‘Do you have pepper spray?’’

Carrie nodded.

‘‘Get it out.’’ She locked the car and, armed, the two of them hurried past the twitching man, around the corner and into the building. The interior of the tenement house was, if possible, even worse than the exterior. Away from the public, taggers had felt free to cover every available inch of space with spray painted words and pictures. The unlit corridor smelled of stale urine and vomit. Huff bags, syringes and broken liquor bottles littered the floor.

‘‘Holly lived upstairs,’’ Jan said, walking slowly and holding the spray can of Mace in front of her. ‘‘On the second floor. The stairway’s up ahead.’’

Carrie’s heart was pounding. She had no desire to walk up any dark stairwell, and the rational part of her brain was telling her to turn tail and run. But there was nothing rational about the impulse that had brought her here, and the crazy desire to find the rhino boy overrode all arguments.

She remembered her dream of the blackout, heard in her mind Juan’s raspy chuckle and the two English words whispered by Rosalia:
‘‘He’s coming.’’
The panic she felt now was eerily similar to the emotion she’d experienced in the nightmare, and she gripped her pepper spray more tightly as she and Jan approached the open stairwell. The two of them walked up the steps together. Shadows bathed the landing, and the strong, sickening stench of feces arose about them. Gagging, Carrie tried to breathe through her mouth, being careful where she stepped, although in the darkness she couldn’t really see the stairs beneath her feet.

They reached the second floor without incident.

The hallway was dark, the building quiet.

Too quiet.

Carrie hadn’t noticed it before, but the sounds of life usually heard in apartment buildings—crying babies, radios, televisions, arguments—were completely absent. Instead, an unnatural stillness seemed to have settled over the tenement house. They were in the center of the building, surrounded by dozens of rooms, yet it seemed as though they were all alone.

There was indeed a looming sense that someone—or
something
—was approaching, that if any people other than themselves
were
in the building, they were sitting in frightened silence behind closed, locked doors, desperately trying not to make a sound. As much as the threatening physical surroundings, it was this completely unfounded feeling that something big was on its way that made her pulse pound and struck terror in her heart. Carrie looked down the hallway, suddenly seized by the irrational conviction that if they could only get inside one of the apartments and out of the corridor, they would be safe.

She glanced over at Jan. The other social worker seemed, if not unconcerned for their safety, at least oblivious to this unseen threat, and Carrie forced herself to breathe deeply, calm down. She wasn’t ordinarily an imaginative person, but something about Juan and the rhino boy and the entire situation set her nerves on edge and made her far more susceptible to illusory dangers than she usually was.

‘‘Apartment 210,’’ Jan said, and though her voice wasn’t loud, it sounded amplified in the stillness. She must have noticed it, too, because when she said, ‘‘It’s right up here on the left,’’ she whispered the words.

If there was a focal point to the silence, a still center about which the noiselessness spiraled, it was apartment number 210. Carrie had no idea what made her think such a thing, but as she stopped in front of the battered door, she was convinced that it was so. The two of them stood there for a moment, looking at each other, both of them nervous.

It was Jan who stepped forward and knocked on the door.

They waited several seconds, but there was no answer.

‘‘Maybe she’s not here,’’ Carrie suggested. ‘‘Maybe she’s on the street.’’

‘‘Or strung out,’’ Jan said hopefully.

But neither of them believed that, and as Jan turned the knob of the unlocked door and pushed against the peeling facade, Carrie prepared herself for what they might find inside.

It was a good thing she did.

The front room had been trashed. A coffee table was split in half, a mirror smashed, several wooden chairs broken, a television screen shattered, a crib crushed under the weight of an overturned couch. The lone window in the kitchenette was closed, and a suffocating stench permeated the air, a horrible, foul smell that was worse than rotting meat and worse than human waste but somehow incorporated both.

Blood was everywhere.

Jan was gagging, holding her hand over her nose and mouth, but Carrie had already taken out her cell phone and was calling 911. Even as she spoke to the dispatcher, explaining who they were and what they’d found, giving the address of Holly’s apartment, Carrie was looking about the room, trying to find a body, searching for concreteinformation that she could provide the police. She was surprised by how calm she was acting, but she shouldn’t have been. Under pressure, she inevitably went into automatic mode. Her training took over, and she was always able to handle any crisis that was thrown at her. It was only later, when all was done, that the full weight of what had occurred would sink in, and it was then that she would collapse into a trembling heap of gelatinous protoplasm.

The dispatcher informed her that officers were on their way and told her to stay on the line, but Carrie hung up on him. Hand still over her nose and mouth, Jan was moving cautiously toward the bedroom and Carrie joined her. They were probably destroying evidence with every footstep, but if Holly or her son were still alive, they owed it to the two of them to try to help.

They reached the open doorway.

If the front room was bad, the bedroom was even worse.

The bed was covered with blood and feathers. The sheets had been torn, the mattress and pillows ripped open, as though whoever had done this had been searching for something hidden and valuable. Carrie knew that was not the case, though. In the same way that she’d known she had to find Holly
today
, she was certain that whoever had torn up the apartment had done so in order to hide his real motive: killing the hooker and her son.

Holly herself, nude and spread-eagled, lay half on, half off the bed, her belly slit open, its gruesome contents piled next to her on the blood-soaked mattress. In her mouth, the young woman’s remaining teeth were red, and one eye was swollen shut while the other was wide open, giving the corpse an unnerving, deranged look.

Carrie’s gaze focused on Holly’s hanging hand, where a white feather lay glued to the back of the woman’s index finger with congealed blood. It was an eerie imitationof the artwork from a children’s book of horror stories titled
More Tales to Tremble By.
Her uncle had given her the book for a birthday present, and as a young girl she had been terrified by the pictures on the cover, even going so far as to hide the book in her closet so she wouldn’t see its spine on her bookshelf when she tried to fall asleep.

The feather fluttered in the breeze generated by Jan’s passing, then loosened and fell to the floor, landing in a puddle of blood that immediately soaked the feather and turned it completely red.

It was obvious to both of them that Holly was dead, but Jan still placed a finger on the woman’s carotid artery to check for a pulse. Her eyes met Carrie’s and she shook her head, grimacing.

Carrie turned away, looking to the left at the sight she’d been avoiding since entering the bedroom. The
Weekly Globe
had not lied. There really was a rhino boy. Or there
had
been a rhino boy. For someone had cut off the child’s head, tossing the small, broken body against the wall, where it lay slumped at an impossible angle on the side of the dresser, and placing the head atop the bureau, where dead eyes stared sightlessly over the room through slitted apertures in the rough gray face.

Carrie felt sick. She had no idea what had happened here or why, but the insane savagery of these murders and the lengths to which their perpetrator had gone in order to disguise his true intent made her think that this was far more than just an ordinary crime.

She wondered if Rosalia and Juan were in danger, too.

Already, she could hear sirens approaching. She wondered if the police who had been involved in the confrontation down the street had finished with their business and were now on their way here or whether an entirely new set of cops had been dispatched. It didn’t matter. Either way, someone was coming to the rescue. She felt a tremendous sense of relief and realized for the first time just how frightened she was. The automatic sense of duty that had kicked in was finally starting to slip, denial and impassive detachment giving way to horror and emotional comprehension. Already her hands were starting to tremble.

‘‘Let’s wait out in the hall,’’ Jan said, her voice shaky. ‘‘I can’t take this anymore.’’

Carrie nodded, and the two of them made their way carefully back out the way they’d come, maneuvering through the apartment in an effort to cause as little contamination to the crime scene as possible.

Technically, Carrie supposed, that was correct, but the description was far too prosaic. What had happened here was much more than a mere crime, and to classify it as such was to diminish it. This was something deeper, more complex and far more frightening, and she did not feel safe until the interviews were over and she and Jan were out of the building, out of the neighborhood and back at the office.

Five

The big story was still Tom Lowry. A week after his death, the Beverly Hills businessman’s epic breakdown was still front-page news in Los Angeles, and Brian desperately wished he could get in on that action. Although he hadn’t shared it with anyone, he had an angle on the story that no one else did: the crazy scrawls found in Lowry’s journal and on the blood-spattered walls of his bedroom looked exactly like the ‘‘writing’’ on his father’s letter. He had no idea what he could do with such information, but it was that connection much more than his traditional reporter’s instinct that made him want— no,
need
—to investigate the murder spree.

He was the low man on the totem pole, however. Despite his awards, despite the fact that the
Times
had actively recruited and hired him, there were other reporters with more awards and, more important, greater seniority. Brian was going to have to prove himself before any editor trusted him with a plum assignment like the Lowry killings.

Right now, he was waiting for callbacks on three different stories, and he sat in the break room with a sports columnist, a couple of feature writers and an editorial assistant. All of them were reading various sections of today’s paper. Ted Sprague, an entertainment reporter, walked in, got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat down next to Brian at the middle table. ‘‘So,’’ he announced to the room, ‘‘what do you think is the best Charlie Brown cartoon? I’m conducting a little in-house survey.’’

‘‘For what?’’ asked Mike Duskin, the columnist.

‘‘For an article I’m doing.’’

‘‘What’s it about?’’

‘‘I’m not going to play games with you. Answer the question or not. I don’t give a shit.’’

Mike laughed. ‘‘Okay, okay.’’ He thought for a moment. ‘‘Has to be the Great Pumpkin.’’

‘‘Why?’’

‘‘I don’t know. It’s the funniest. Has the best music.’’

‘‘I vote for the Christmas one!’’ Steve Hernandez shouted out.

‘‘I hate the Christmas one,’’ Max Banks said. ‘‘Charlie Brown is such a fucking whiner.’’

Everyone laughed except Ted, who seemed on some level to be genuinely offended. ‘‘He’s not a whiner,’’ Ted said defensively. ‘‘He’s just depressed because Christmas has become so commercialized.’’

‘‘He’s a loser and a whiner. Let’s look at the facts, Jack. At the beginning, Charlie Brown pouts because he didn’t get a Christmas card and no one likes him. So to cheer him up, Lucy makes him the director of the play, though he has absolutely no qualifications for the position. He becomes a complete megalomaniac, insisting that the most important thing is for everyone to pay attention to
him
, the director. When the other kids ignore him and have a little fun dancing, he throws a tantrum, slams his megaphone on the floor and bangs his head on the wooden arm of the chair. To placate him, Lucy sends him out to buy a Christmas tree, making a specific request for the kind of tree that would best serve the play. Charlie Brown completely disregards her instructions, thinking
he
knows better, and gets the wrong one. When everyone laughs at him, he cries that he doesn’t understand the true meaning of Christmas. Linus explains it to him, and when everyone is feeling good and humble and a rapprochement is possible, Charlie Brown doesn’t apologize or make up with the other kids—he takes his tree and walks out. On the way home, he steals one of Snoopy’s ornaments to decorate his tree. When it’s too heavy for the little tree and makes it bend over, he gives up, quits and runs away crying. Everyone else has to decorate it for him. After he sees what a good job they did, he finally agrees to sing with them. Like I said: a loser and a whiner.’’