What the Night Knows (21 page)

This suggested that of the two explanations for the incident—
either supernatural or delusional—the latter was more likely. Nuts. He was nuts. Loony, loco, crackers, screwy, one shoe short of a pair.

Maybe for his own good, he should sign himself into a monkey house, wear one of those monkey jackets with the long sleeves that tied behind your back, and be entertained by stupid freaking monkey thoughts swinging through his empty skull.

Or not.

Being able to consider the idea that he might be insane pretty much ruled out madness. Raving lunatics never wondered if they were lunatics; they believed the other six billion people in the world were lunatics and that they themselves were pillars of reason.

Instead of convincing Zach that what happened in the service mezzanine must have been a delusion, the restored fork ticked him off and made him more determined than ever to learn the truth about what was happening in this house. He knew when he was being jacked around. He wasn’t a dog so dumb that he didn’t see the leash. He wasn’t a naive idiot who would happily chow down on cow pies because someone told him they were chocolate cake.

With insanity off the table, one explanation remained: something supernatural. If a supernatural force could screw up the meat fork, then it was a no-brainer that the same supernatural force could make it right again.

Any alternate theory would now have to identify a human villain, some clown with a self-serving reason for replacing the twisted fork with an identical but undamaged utensil.

Zach gave himself a week to think and to see what might happen next. He thought, all right, but nothing happened. The trapdoor didn’t fall open by itself, and the ladder didn’t self-deploy. Every night, feeling like a wuss, he braced his closet door with a chair, but the knob never rattled and nothing in there turned on the light.

His parents were the high command, and he was a grunt. A grunt didn’t go to the high command with a wild story about a ghost in the service mezzanine unless he had the ghost in chains.

Zach gave himself another week. And then another.

He began to wonder if that one episode was going to be the whole of it. Some half-assed ghost rides in from the hereafter, plays with a stupid light switch and a trapdoor ladder, screws up a meat fork, fixes the fork, gets bored, and splits for some other ghost gig. That scenario seemed even more lame than the usual brain-dead horror movie full of boneheads doing every wrong thing to get themselves killed.

But if it was finished, that would be okay with Zach. He wanted to be a marine, not a ghostbuster.

Dr. Westlake doubted very much that Nicolette’s idiosyncratic adverse reaction to Vicodin could continue to manifest three and a half weeks after she took her last dose. But he wanted to research the issue and get back to her the next day.

She said nothing about the hallucination to John. She hoped to avoid worrying him.

The following day, when Dr. Westlake called, he all but ruled out the possibility that her latest experience could be related to Vicodin; however, he wanted her to have a complete blood workup, just as a precaution.

Nicky never fretted about anything. Brooding about possible calamities seemed to be ingratitude. Her life was bright with family and love, her paintings were acclaimed and sold for excellent prices, and in return her minimum obligation included being happy and giving thanks for her good fortune.

Always, even during darker times, she’d been cheerful, hopeful. Surely life was too short to waste any of it in the expectation of disaster. Even when Minnie had been ill and the malady difficult to diagnose, Nicolette prayed but didn’t dwell for a moment on darker possibilities, on
any
possibility except Minnie’s complete recovery.

She wasn’t a Pollyanna. She knew terrible things happened to the best of people, to people far better than she would ever be, even to people as good and as innocent as Minette. But she also
knew
that the power of the imagination could shape reality. Every day she made real on canvas the scenes that would be otherwise confined forever to her mind; therefore, it seemed a half step in logic to believe that the imagination might
directly
influence reality, without the physical intervention of the artist, that what was feared obsessively might manifest in the real world. Worry wasn’t worth the risk of worry’s possible consequences.

Returning to her painting with enthusiasm, she finished the triptych during the week she waited to learn the results of the blood workup. The painting turned out well, perhaps as good as anything she’d done to date, and the laboratory tests confirmed that she was in good health.

She started another picture. A second week passed, a third, and she experienced no more hallucinations. Happy with her work, Nicky became convinced that regardless of what Dr. Westlake said, the weird episode in the bathroom indeed had been related to Vicodin, one last spasm of its influence in her system, and that she would be troubled no further.

Although aware of a persistent tension in John, she had seen its like before. She assumed that when at last he nailed the killer of the schoolteacher and closed his current case, his stress would be relieved.

As September waned and then October dawned, the beautiful autumn
revealed no blemish except for Nicky’s dream. She woke from it nearly every night, with no memory of its characters or story, yet certain that it was always the same dream. Because she never woke in fear and routinely returned to sleep without difficulty, she didn’t believe this dream qualified as a nightmare, but sometimes it left her with an unclean feeling so that she rose to wash her face and hands.

She had a vague recollection of being the object of desire in the dream, of being wanted desperately by someone whom she did not want in return. The intensity and persistence of whoever wanted her and her unrelenting resistance left Nicky exhausted when she woke, which is perhaps why she never had trouble falling asleep again.

When he arrived home after relinquishing the key to the Lucas house, John learned from Walter Nash that the stench in the laundry room had relented as abruptly as it had arisen. “Doesn’t seem to be any reason to dismantle the dryer,” Walter said. “Whatever the stink was, it must not have been a decomposing rat. It’s a mystery for the moment, but I’ll keep thinking on it.”

Over dinner, Nicky and the kids seemed subdued, but John thought his own mental state must be the damper on the evening. Billy Lucas was gone and with him any hope that he might one day answer further questions. Worse, John was found in the Lucas house without a valid reason, and he revealed his concern that his family might be targeted for murder, a fear that must have appeared irrational to Ken Sharp. He could not predict how the day’s events would affect his ability to protect Nicky and the kids, but he knew his options would be fewer.

The following morning, he returned to work and to the case of Edward Hartman, the high-school teacher who had been beaten to
death in his lakeside home. Lionel Timmins, the partner with whom he shared responsibility for the investigation, had been chasing leads during John’s two sick days; over coffee in an unused interrogation room, Lionel brought him up to date.

Timmins was black, fourteen years older than John, three inches shorter, forty pounds heavier, and so broad in the upper torso that some other cops called him the Walking Chest. He had been married, but his obsessive commitment to his job led to a divorce before any kids came along. His elderly mother and her two spinster sisters lived with him; and although he was devoted to those ladies, no one with a healthy survival instinct would ever call Lionel a mama’s boy.

In countless ways, John and Lionel were different from each other, but in one way they were more alike than any other two detectives in the division: Homicide investigation was less a job to them than it was a sacred calling. As a sixteen-year-old, Lionel had been charged with the brutal murder of a woman named Andrea Solano, during the course of a burglary. The state tried him as an adult, the jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. While he was in prison, his beloved father died. After Lionel spent six years in a high-security cell, the real burglar-murderer was arrested in another case and tied to the Solano killing by evidence in his possession; eventually, he confessed. Without that lucky break, Lionel would have rotted in prison. Released, the crime expunged from his record, he became a cop and eventually a detective with two compelling goals: first, to put murderers behind bars, on death row if they deserved it; second, to be sure that, at least on his watch, no one hung a murder conviction around the neck of an innocent man.

As partners, they were friends but not best buddies, largely because they spent less time together than other paired detectives. They worked as a team, but they did not ride in tandem. Both were devoted
family men when at home, which they preferred to the world beyond those walls, but at work they were loners, each with his unique style of investigation, each impatient with the accommodations that same-car partners inevitably had to make for each other. They divvied up leads, accomplished twice as much as they would if yoked together, backed up each other when the task required that, compared notes at the end of every day, and had the highest case-closed record in Robbery-Homicide.

The Hartman assignment should have been engaging; the victim was a teacher, as John’s murdered parents had been. But he was not able to focus as sharply as necessary. He was distracted by thoughts of the Lucas murders and by fear of October fifth, which would be the date of the next killings if the crimes of Alton Turner Blackwood were indeed being replayed. The Hartman investigation swiftly became the poorest effort of his career.

Six days after returning to work, he received a summons to the office of Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives. Ken Sharp had filed a report about John’s visits to Billy at the hospital, the illegal entries at the Lucas house, and their conversation in Billy’s room.

Burchard employed a wise-old-uncle managerial style and rarely raised his voice. As a disciplinarian, he preferred to approach the situation as alternately a caring surrogate father, an understanding colleague, and a therapist. He was stout within the physical limits of the department, white-haired, with a face made for dinner-theater comedies about twinkly-eyed older men who were assumed to be a bit daft because they claimed to be Santa Claus or angels who needed to earn their wings.

In order to explain his actions, John had to reveal what had happened to his family when he was fourteen. The story earned him Nelson Burchard’s pity, which he didn’t want and which seemed
both genuine yet unctuous. The man’s cloying earnestness made John’s revelations even harder to disclose than he expected.

As caring as he might have been, Burchard also saw at once that an experience of such horror at a young age might seed psychological problems that could make a career in Robbery-Homicide particularly taxing, problems that might not sprout and ripen until they were, so to speak, fertilized by a case disturbingly reminiscent of the long-ago trauma.

“I understand your concern that Billy was imitating Blackwood. But he
did
turn himself in. If he intended to kill again, he wouldn’t have done that.” Burchard leaned forward in one of the armchairs in the counseling corner of his office. “Did you really worry that he might escape the state hospital?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe.” Although John could not have avoided telling Burchard about what happened twenty years earlier, he found it impossible to raise the theory that a murderous spirit might have operated through Billy Lucas.
Possession
was not a word any defense lawyer would ever use or any judge ever countenance. “The striking similarities between the Valdane and Lucas massacres wasn’t something I could ignore. I just … I had to know.… I’m not entirely sure why, but I had to know if Blackwood inspired Billy.”

“You told Ken Sharp there were documents on the boy’s computer—they indicated your family was one of his targets.”