What the Night Knows (22 page)

“There were. I saw them the first time I was in the house. But someone deleted them.”

Burchard’s jolly face remained in a Christmas Eve expression, though his eyes now twinkled less with goodwill than with the glint of a forensic surgeon’s scalpel. “Ken reviewed the backup CDs made of the computer’s hard drive. There aren’t any documents about your family on those, either.”

The armchair seemed like an execution-chamber chair. John wanted to get up and move around. He remained seated and said nothing.

“The backup CDs were secure in the evidence locker,” Burchard said. “You don’t think someone could have gotten to them?”

“No. I don’t. Not in the locker. I can’t explain it, sir. But I stand by what I said that I saw.”

As if it pained him to look at John just then, Burchard turned his attention to a window and the steel-gray sky. “Whatever the boy’s intentions might have been, he’s dead. There’ll be no more killing of families now.”

“October fifth,” John said. “That’s the day. Or would have been if his murders were an homage. Blackwood’s homicidal periodicity was precise. Thirty-three days.”

When he looked at John again, Burchard said, “But he’s dead.”

“What if he didn’t do it alone?”

“But he did. There’s no evidence anyone else was in that house when it all went down.”

“I’m just wondering if—”

“It’s not your case,” Burchard interrupted. “How’s the Hartman job coming along?”

After a hesitation, John said, “I’m sure Lionel’s making progress.”

“But you?”

John shrugged.

“You’re my Thoroughbreds, you and Lionel. But … presenting yourself at the state hospital as the case detective. Trespassing twice in the Lucas house. Maybe all this has knocked you off your stride. Would you say it has?”

“Not so that I can’t regain my footing.”

“You drive every case hard, John. Maybe you need time to rest and
think. Time to put this behind you.” As John began to protest, Burchard raised a hand to halt him. “I’m not talking about a formal suspension. Nothing that’ll wind up on your ten card. You just ask for a thirty-day leave without pay, I’ll authorize it right now.”

“If I don’t want a thirty-day leave?”

“I’d have to pass Sharp’s report upstairs to Parker Moss.”

Moss was the Area 1 commander, a good enough cop but at times a by-the-book sonofabitch.

“And then what?” John asked.

“Maybe a review-board hearing, but probably not. For sure, he’ll want mandatory psychological counseling and an evaluation. Because of the undisclosed childhood trauma.”

“I’m not coming unwrapped.”

“I don’t believe you are. Which is why I’d prefer dealing with it this way. But if it gets to Moss, he’ll follow protocols.”

“You want my tin and my piece?”

“No. On unpaid leave you still follow off-duty rules. You carry at all times, you’re plainclothes auxiliary.”

Under the circumstances, it was important to John to be able legally to continue carrying a concealed weapon.

“All right,” he conceded. “But what’ll you tell Lionel?”

“That’s up to you.”

“Family matters,” John decided.

“He’ll want to know more than that.”

“Yeah. But we never pry at each other.”

“Then it’s family matters,” Burchard said.

“It has the virtue of being true.”

“You’d be uncomfortable lying to him?”

“Couldn’t do it,” John said.

On unpaid leave, he had little more to do than to anticipate October fifth. That he became increasingly restless and apprehensive day by day was no surprise.

Determined to spare Nicolette and the kids needless anxiety, he avoided telling them about his thirty-day leave. He left in the morning as if for work, killed time at movies that didn’t entertain him, at libraries where he learned nothing he needed to know, on ten-mile walks that failed to tire him.

He no longer entertained any doubts about the supernatural nature of the threat if only because nothing else could explain how Billy had known the next-to-last thing that Alton Turner Blackwood said before John killed him:
Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts
.

Nevertheless, he harbored a small hope that he kept afloat with prayer and with his long-embraced belief that the concept of fate had no validity. With the proper exercise of free will, he could see his wife and children safely through this troubled time. Such conviction, even if tenuous, was essential to hold fast to sanity.

If October fifth passed without murders to match Blackwood’s second slaughter, if the pattern of the past changed, John would never need to tell the kids—though perhaps one day he would tell Nicky—that he had endured thirty-three days of gut-twisting dread.

If instead the murders occurred, he would share everything with Nicky and together they would decide what to do. But if the ghost of a homicidal psychopath really could return from the grave and use a human being as a puppet, there seemed to be no weapon that any man or woman could employ against it.

Walking the grid blocks of the city, rambling the lakeside park, and during movies that he only half saw, John was gnawed by a sense
of helplessness not only in regard to the defense of his loved ones but also because he could do nothing to warn whatever family might be the second in this current killing spree.

Twenty years earlier, after the Valdanes, the Sollenburgs had been Blackwood’s next target.

Their master suite lay at the farther end of the house from other bedrooms, the main living spaces intervening: convenient for a murderer who planned to kill his targets in a certain order and who hoped not to alert the fourth and final victim when executing the first three.

The parents, Louis and Rhoda, had been murdered in their bed, beginning with the husband. Louis was shot once in the head while sleeping. The presence of steel-wool fibers in the wound indicated that the killer had fashioned a homemade silencer for his 9-mm pistol.

Perhaps the muffled gunfire woke Rhoda or perhaps she woke when Blackwood switched on the light. He shot her twice as she sprang off the bed, and she died on the floor.

With no scream from either victim and the gunfire adequately muffled, Blackwood was able to make his way across the house at his leisure, taking the time to savor the murders he had just committed and to anticipate with dark delight the brutalities soon to come.

The homemade silencer deteriorated quickly. He carried a pillow from the parents’ bedroom to further suppress the sound of the shot with which he killed Eric, the fifteen-year-old son, in his bed.

With three dead, Blackwood was alone with seventeen-year-old Sharon Sollenburg. Subsequently, the medical examiner estimated that she had been shot more than four hours after her brother was killed.

The humiliations and cruelties that the girl suffered during those
four hours, as reported in the autopsy, sickened even homicide detectives who thought they had seen everything but discovered now a more savage and inventive monster than they had known before.

Her suffering did not end when Blackwood shot her. The ratio of high serotonin to lower free histamine levels in the wound indicated that she had taken at least half an hour to die.

Torn candy wrappers and smears of chocolate on the upholstery suggested that her murderer sat in an armchair and ate three Almond Joy bars while he watched life fade from her. Blood on the wrappers indicated that he had not washed his hands between his games with the girl and his snack.

Like the victims at the Valdane house, all four Sollenburgs were left with black quarters epoxied to their eyelids, carefully shaped coins of dried feces on their tongues, and specially prepared hollow eggs in their bound hands.

Twenty years later, in this great city, there must be thousands of families consisting of father, mother, son, and daughter. There was no way to know who might be marked for death.

Furthermore, it could be wrong to assume the killer would not seek a family of five instead of four, one with two or three girls instead of a single daughter. After all, the widowed aunt who was part of the Valdane family, two decades ago, was a grandmother at the Lucas house in the here and now, and the ages of one set of victims were not identical to the ages of the other. The methods of murder and certain other details were the same, but the scenarios were not in every aspect identical.

This entire state did not have half enough police to mount protective surveillance of every family in the city that might be targeted.

As September became October, the green trees of summer dressed themselves in the spectacle of autumn. Purple beeches became bright
copper, and frisia turned even more orange than the yellow buckeye. Silver-leafed poplars paid out a dividend of gold, and the enormous scarlet oak on the south yard of the Calvino property lived up to its name for the first time all year.

Late on the afternoon of October fourth, on the eve of the dreaded date, when John came home early from pretending to work, the house was transformed. He felt the difference the moment that he got out of the car in the basement garage, a freshness to the air, a curious perception that everything was cleaner than it had been, a sense that a pall had been lifted from the place. This feeling only increased as he ascended through the residence.

He had been weighed down by worry and had not realized that an oppressive aura had settled on the house itself. For weeks, the rooms had felt less harmonious in their proportions than before; the lamps and ceiling fixtures had appeared to be dialed down even when all the dimmer switches were at their highest settings; the artworks and the furnishings had seemed tired and in conflict with one another; and although the air had not reeked of Billy Lucas’s urine, it had been stale, like the air in a moldering old museum, thick with dust and history. He realized all of that only in retrospect, now that the house was bright and welcoming once more.

Perhaps no one else felt the change as profoundly as did John, for only he suspected—all right,
knew
—that something had come home with him from the state hospital twenty-six days earlier. If Nicky and the kids weren’t consciously aware that the house had been under a kind of cloud that had now dissipated, they must have felt the difference because they were all livelier and merrier at dinner than they had been for days. The rapid conversation had its old bounce—from wit to badinage, to persiflage, and back again.

The food tasted better, too, and the wine, not because Walter and
Imogene had outdone themselves, for their standards were always high, but because the familiar cheerful atmosphere of the house had been restored, which was an essential spice that, like salt, enhanced the flavor of all things. If something otherworldly had been here the past three and a half weeks, that presence was now inarguably gone.

Once he had convinced himself to embrace the unknown, to accept that a malevolent spirit might find its way back into the world and into his life, John had imagined that the haunting would progress as it did in books and movies. First came subtle moments of strangeness for which reasoned explanations might be fashioned, and then ever more bizarre and fearsome manifestations escalated to the third act, when the terror would reveal its true ferocity and the invaded house would become a hell on Earth. Until now he had not considered that a haunting might peter out between the first and the second acts, that the ties binding the haunter and the haunted might be as vulnerable to weariness and indifference as were so many relationships in which both parties were living.

John entertained this hopeful thought only through the soup and partway through the entrée. Long before dessert, he realized the invading spirit had not dissipated or departed forever. By whatever means such entities traveled, whether by magic or by moonlight, or on wheels of sheer malevolence, this one had gone in search of its next Billy Lucas, for the glove in which it would conceal itself to murder another family. With that blood ceremony completed, it would return.

29

MACE VOLKER IS A DELIVERYMAN AND A THIEF. NOW THIRTY, he has delivered flowers for a florist since he was nineteen, and he has been stealing since he was eleven. He has never been caught nor has he even once come under suspicion, for he is blessed with a gentle and open face, a most appealing voice, and a fearless nature, all of which he uses as instruments of deception no less artfully than a concert pianist uses his supple, nimble hands.

Mace shoplifts, picks pockets, burglarizes homes. He doesn’t steal solely or even primarily for financial reasons but mainly for the thrill. Stolen cash and goods have a powerful sensual appeal and feel better to him than the silky skin of a beautiful woman. He can’t achieve climax merely by caressing stolen money, but he can become fiercely aroused by the texture of it, sometimes teasing himself for an hour or more, into a sweat of desire, merely by handling purloined twenties and hundreds. A psychiatrist might say Mace is a fetishist. He has had a few girlfriends, but only to see how much he can steal from them: money and possessions, honor and hope and self-respect. Generally
he turns to prostitutes for satisfaction, and the best sex is always when he steals from them the money with which he paid for their services.

There are ten doors into Mace Volker: his sensitive and thieving fingertips.

Twice a week, he delivers flowers to the Calvino house, roses for Nicolette’s studio, and occasionally a dining-table arrangement. This fourth of October, shortly before five o’clock, he has three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses for the artist, each dozen in its own plastic sleeve. He is not taken when he rings the doorbell, but by his index finger on the button, he is known and wanted.

Walter Nash signs for the flowers. Because Walter’s arms are filled with the bundled roses and the greens that come with them, Mace assists him, upon leaving, by pulling the front door shut from outside.
Taken
. Mace isn’t aware that he is no longer alone, that he is now a horse with a rider that might in time dismount without ever making itself known to him—or that might choose instead to ride him to death.