What the Night Knows (19 page)

When Sharp entered Billy’s room, he seemed less puzzled than offended. Head shaved to hide creeping baldness, eyes set deep, nose hawkish, having a tendency to flush with impatience as readily as with rage, he possessed a face better suited to intimidating scowls than to smiles of friendship.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

“A neighbor had a key.”

“That’s
how
you got in. I’m wondering why?”

Twenty years earlier, the police and the courts protected John from reporters who were in those days marginally more responsible and less invasive than the aggressively sensational crew currently running the media circus. His role in Blackwood’s death was more suggested than described, and his status as a juvenile ensured his privacy. In the wake of his loss, he was allowed to fade into his grief and guilt, and
the orphanage became a wall between his future and that night of horror. Even when he went to the police academy, the background report on him reached no further into the past than to his departure from St. Christopher’s Home and School at the age of seventeen years six months, where his record had been exemplary both in terms of academic achievement and discipline.

If they knew his full story, some would suggest that his ordeal might make him psychologically unfit to be a homicide detective. Was not his choice of this career an indication of an obsessive focus on his loss? Did it not suggest in his pursuit of every murderer that he might be seeking symbolic revenge for the slaughter of his family? And in that case, could he be trusted to treat every suspect with a presumption of innocence, or was he likely to abuse his power as an officer of the law?

The moment he revealed the events of that long-ago night, his life and the lives of his wife and children would change. His ability to function as a detective would be diminished, might even be more profoundly affected than he believed, in ways he could not predict. And of all the people in Robbery-Homicide, Ken Sharp was the least likely to treat John’s revelations with discretion.

Sitting on the edge of the desk, his mood far less casual than his posture suggested, Sharp said, “And just minutes ago I heard you’ve been up to the state hospital twice to see the butcher boy. You told them you were assigned to the case.”

That was a harder blow to John’s credibility than being caught searching Billy’s desk.

“No. I didn’t tell them I was the go-to guy. I will admit … I let them make that assumption.”

“You did, huh? Why the hell did you, John?”

Sooner rather than later, he would have to tell someone about the
eerie similarities between the murders of the Valdane family two decades earlier and the recent massacre of the Lucases. He was morally bound to warn that the crimes of Alton Turner Blackwood were perhaps being imitated half a continent away from the place where they were once committed. He didn’t know how he could deliver that warning without mentioning his suspicion that this case had a supernatural dimension, an assertion that might require him to be suspended and to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

Sharp’s face looked boiled. “An orderly up there says maybe you think Billy’s innocent, you think he’s some kind of victim himself.”

“No. That’s wrong. I know he did it. But it’s not that simple.”

“Hey, pal, it’s as goddamn simple as anything gets. He’s naked on the front porch, drenched in blood. He says he did them all. His prints are on every weapon. The lab says his semen was in the sister. What you’ve got here is you’ve got the
definition
of an open-and-shut case.”

This was neither the time at which nor the audience to which John would have chosen to make his revelations, but he could not avoid telling at least some of his story to Sharp.

Rolling shut the desk drawer he had been searching, switching on Billy’s computer, he said, “I have reason to believe the killer—the boy—intended to murder more families than his own.”

“That would be a noisemaker if it’s true. What reason?”

“First, I want you to understand why I poached your case. My own family is one of the others he intended to kill.”

John did not look up from the computer to see Sharp’s reaction, but he heard both surprise and skepticism in the man’s voice.

“Your family? How’s he know your family? He never said anything about whacking a cop’s family.”

“There’s a document on this computer,” John said, “photos of my wife and kids. It’s the start of a murder scrapbook.”

On the computer were
two
documents of interest—CALVINO1 and CALVINO2—the first of which would crack the lock on John’s past whether he wanted that door flung open or not. He could see no way to show Ken Sharp the second document but not the first.

“Why’d you come here in the first place?” Sharp asked. “How’d you know this thing was on his computer, you should look for it?”

John scrolled down the alphabetized directory—and found no documents with his name as their titles. He scrolled to the top and down again:
A, B, C
, into the
D
s.

“It’s not here. It was right here last night, my name in the title, and now it’s not.”

“A murder scrapbook of your family, and now it’s gone? Where’s it gone?”

In his own voice, John heard how sincerity could sound like slippery evasion. “It’s been deleted. Someone must’ve scrubbed the directory.”

“Who? I mean, Billy sure as hell didn’t come back and scrub it.”

“I don’t know who.” John couldn’t say there had been a ghost in the machine, literally a ghost. “But someone did it.”

Sharp got up from the edge of the desk. His expression was dark, but his face brightened to the high pink of fresh-cut ham.

“Give me the keys you got from the neighbor.”

Instead of fulfilling that request, John exited the directory, switched off the computer, and said, “You’ve got a full backup of the hard drive in the evidence locker. Load it up, look for two documents—Calvino 1 and Calvino 2.”

“John, for God’s sake, what you’ve done is possible criminal trespass,
I shouldn’t even be here myself with the investigation closed now. Seems like you’ve got a screw loose about this case, I don’t know why, but it’s my case, mine and Sam’s, and I want those keys.”

As he produced the key ring with the dangling-cat charm and surrendered it to Sharp, John said, “Load the backup. Look for those documents. Do it, all right? Other families are in jeopardy, Ken. Not only mine.”

“For one thing,” Sharp said, pocketing the key, “no one’s ever escaped from the high-security floor of the state hospital.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“For another thing, Billy Lucas is dead.”

The news struck John harder than he might have expected. He recalled the broken boy as he had been only that morning: arms restrained by netting, in a trancelike thrall of grief and despair.

“Dead—when?” he asked.

“Less than an hour ago. I got a call from Coleman Hanes. That’s when I learned about—you.”

“How did he manage to do it?”

“He didn’t. Not suicide. There’ll be an autopsy. Right now it looks like maybe it was a cerebral hemorrhage.”

The past was a weight John Calvino had always carried. Now it was worse than a weight, it was a noose, and he felt the roughness of it around his neck.

“What’s going on with you, John? We don’t run the ball the same way, but we’re on the same team, and you’ve always seemed like you have enough of the right stuff.”

“I’m sorry, Ken. I shouldn’t have tramped your heels like this. I’m in a strange place. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Right now I’ve got some thinking to do.”

He went down through the murder house, and Sharp followed.

On the staircase landing, John paused only briefly to look at
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
. The two little girls in white dresses looked happy in the garden with the Chinese lanterns, happy and safe and unaware that Evil walked the world.

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

The boy and the world would never be in harmony, but the boy and the night became as one. The boy flowed through the woods and meadows of the night, and the night flowed through the boy
.

After that first exhilarating excursion, which ended minutes before dawn, he carried a small flashlight with him for those places where moonlight couldn’t reach and for those nights when the sky was moonless or brightened by only the thinnest crescent. He never used the flashlight within sight of the house
.

Over the next few years, the boy’s night vision improved to an uncanny degree. The more time he spent out in the world between dusk and dawn, the better he could see even when the sky was overcast and the stars were only legend. He used the flashlight less and less, and his trust of the night was rewarded when the night increasingly, generously opened itself to him
.

Once, kneeling at the edge of the deep pond, listening to fish take insects off the surface and wondering whether he might be quick enough with his hand to snatch one of those closest to the bank, he glimpsed his vague reflection in the inky water. But his eyes were not dark as human eyes should have been in such conditions. In them shimmered the faintest gold of animal eye-shine; his eyes drank in the weak glow from a quarter moon and the far twinkle of stars, and magnified them to assist his vision
.

However far the boy went or how late he roamed, the raven stayed with him. He was sure it did. Sometimes he saw it backlit by the moon or detected its silhouette gliding across a star-speckled vault. From time to time, he glimpsed its moonshadow undulating across the land
.

And if for periods of time he didn’t see the bird, he always heard it. The flap of pinions. The
whoosh
of rigid wings in a gliding dive. The disturbance of leaves as it preceded him tree limb to tree limb through the dismal forest. Its low resonant
prruck,
its baritone
brronk,
its occasional bell-clear cry
.

The raven was his companion, his tutelary, his familiar. The raven taught him about the night, and the boy began to learn what the night knows
.

The land welcomed the boy as entirely as the darkness did. The fields, the woods, the stream, the pond, every vale and every hill and every thrusting mass of rock. He could walk any deer trail, make a new trail of his own, thrash through a thicket of any composition, and come to dawn without a burr or thistle in his clothes, without nettle rash or poison ivy. No insect ever bit or stung him, nor any snake. He could ascend steep inclines of loose shale as quietly as he could make his way up slopes of grass. No vine tripped, no bramble snared. He was never lost. He roamed the night land as though he might be some goat-legged, goat-eared, horned god who ruled all wild things
.

In time, he began to kill two or three nights a month. Mostly rabbits. They appeared before dusk, coming out of their burrows
,
into meadows, to nibble on tender grass and flavorful weeds. The boy sat in the meadow to wait for them, sometimes catching the musky smell of them before they arrived. His own scent was by this time familiar to everything that ran or hopped, or crawled, or slithered. He could sit on a rock or log with such perfect stillness and for so long that they feared him no more than they feared the thing on which he sat. When they wandered close, he seized them, either to strangle them or snap their necks, or stab them with his knife
.

He dispatched them neither to feed upon them nor to take their pelts for trophies. At first he killed to assert his authority over the land and every living thing that it produced. Later, he killed the animals from time to time because he didn’t yet dare kill people, though he knew the day would come when all warm-blooded creatures would be game to him
.

Larger and stronger and quicker than he had once been, the boy also had the power to lure and mesmerize. Deer came to him on narrow trails, at pinch points between steep rocks and phalanxes of trees, their eyes shining brighter than his own—and succumbed to his well-sharpened, furiously swung, and relentless hatchet
.

On mornings that followed a lethal spree, as dawn neared, he stripped to wash himself and his killing clothes in the pond. He laid the garments to dry on a shelf of rock above the water, and dressed again in the unstained clothes that he had worn into the woods the previous twilight
.

One moon-drenched night in his fourth year under the sign of the raven, when the boy was sixteen, as he sat on a throne of weathered rock in a meadow, resting from violent labor, savoring the rich odor of fresh blood, a mountain lion eased out of the brush into shorter grass, and stared hungrily at him. Of all predators in North America, short of the polar bear that was a ruthless killing machine in its arctic realm, the most deadly were the grizzly bear and the mountain lion
.

The confident boy met the big cat’s gaze without fear and with no intention of fleeing from it. He could feel the raven circling in the night overhead. After a lingering assessment, the mountain lion chose to retreat, vanishing into the tall brush from which it had appeared
.

He knew then that whether or not he might be the goat-legged god of this land, he was for certain Death with an uppercase
D.
The cat recognized him as such even though the boy wore no cowled robe and carried no scythe
.

One thing he had learned earlier in this fourth year under the sign of the raven was that if you surrendered yourself entirely to the wilderness and to the night, you became aware of things unseen, ancient and immeasurably powerful presences with savage hungers and dark intentions, that roamed ceaselessly, almost dreaming, that were immortal and therefore never impatient, that were content to wait for the unwary to cross their path. He suspected they existed in cities, too, everywhere that humanity had been or was or would be, but were more evident here in the quiet of the wild, to one who had the heart to acknowledge them
.