A Cruel Season for Dying (52 page)

The terror shook her, threatening her mind. She bit her lip. Tasted blood. Fought.

Slowly the void retreated. In her head a dull thudding ache. In her stomach a sick queasiness. Sound returned. She heard the
fire, sap popping in logs. Felt the heat as a difference at one side of her face. A fireplace was a few yards away. The room
that contained it was large. She experienced its size in the quality of the silence it contained. Beyond was a deeper stillness.

What has happened?

A flash through the haze. A sudden memory of walking, half supported, down the stairs from her apartment. Of being helped
inside a car. An impression of motion that went on and on. The realization they were driving out of the city.

Adrian.
She was remembering more of it now. She had let him come up to the apartment, despite her surprise at his unannounced appearance
on her doorstep. There had been a moment’s hesitation, but then she’d considered how she must face him sometime, tell him
there could be nothing but friendship between them.

She unwrapped her arms and struggled up against the pillows, her hands searching outward at air, fighting the nausea, the
pain in her head that sharpened and sliced through her stupor.

What has he done to me? To Taiko?
The terror returned. Precise now. Fear penetrating her confusion. Fear and shame.
How could I let this happen? What will Jimmy think?

And then the real fear as her helplessness came into focus, the depth of her danger.

She swallowed and breathed deep, trying to keep the fog from her mind. Tears welled in her eyes as she clutched with her hands
at her belly. She wept for her child and was still. Listening now, gathering information in the quiet, till understanding
wound like a serpent in her heart. She was not alone, nor had been. Adrian watched in the dark.

There were two James Sakuras now. The husband whose heart raced with the horror of things imagined, whose mind was screaming
to hurry with the fear that even now it might be too late. And then there was the other, the automaton who meticulously, if
fruitlessly, searched his apartment for clues to the identity behind the clay face. The robot without emotion already planning
to hide the information that would absolutely bar him from a case in which he’d committed the sin of becoming both its subject
and its object. The iron man scheming. The husband praying for the miracle that would make a rescue possible. For beyond the
need for proof, he knew what others might not believe—that the attack on Michael had been but the first act in this suddenly
personal drama, that the man whose face he’d destroyed in the clay had also taken his wife.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
Suzuki-roshi’s phrase had become insistent, sprung from some hidden reservoir. He had to leave behind the training that had
not served. He must find again his beginner’s mind, accept his own
suchness.
He was not so separate from the evil he pursued. The chaos, which he sought to control, breathed with his breath …was everywhere.

He watched himself as if from some far distance, returning to headquarters, avoiding the officers who were awaiting his address
in the operations room. The mood was chaotic, the task force having been in a kind of limbo since Graff’s suicide and the
subsequent loss of the physical evidence that had tied him to the crime. He went straight to his office and ignored the messages
on his phone demanding his presence in the chief of detectives’ office.

Kelly came in, eyeing him strangely as if sensing some of what lay beneath the robot veneer.

“You have any idea what Michael might have been looking at last night?” he asked.

Kelly shook his head. “Like I told you, I didn’t talk to Darius, didn’t see him till he was leaving.” He shifted subjects,
saying what he’d come in here to say. “The chief’s looking for you.”

“I hear that too.” He glanced down at his desk, his eyes hungry for the search. “Look, I need some time in here alone. No
disturbances.”

“Sure,” Kelly said. “I’ll pass the word along. You’re not here, Lieutenant. Haven’t even logged in yet.”

“Thanks, Pat.” He could see the questions in the vet’s eyes. Understood that he wouldn’t ask them.

Alone, the urgency flared. He scanned the desk, then down at the boxes of files still stacked on the floor. What had Michael
been looking at? He turned back to his desk, where everything appeared much as he’d left it. Except for the book. The DiMaio
text on forensics had been taken from the console.

He checked the index. Turned to the back, to the chapter on drug deaths. He went quickly through the topics, slowing at the
sections on homicidal poisonings, but nothing stood out.

His phone rang. He ignored it. Something in this book was a clue to a fact they had missed. He forced himself to proceed logically,
skimming the general topics. Then page by page, faster and faster, eyes scanning down through the text, moving quickly through
the pictures.

He stopped turning. Flipped the page back. The illustration was in the section on nonpedestrian deaths.
Figure 9.5. Imprint of steering wheel on chest.
Concentric broken circles. Lines coming down. The pattern imprinted below the sternum. He read rapidly through the accompanying
text to the paragraph that stopped him:

Occasionally, one will have a motor vehicle accident in which the driver impacts the steering wheel and in which there is no anatomical cause of death after a complete autopsy and toxicological screen. There may be
soft tissue damage to the chest and a fractured sternum or ribs, but not enough injuries to explain death. Such deaths are due to a cardiac contusion, with the mechanism of death being a fatal arrhythmia.

A fatal arrhythmia.
The mechanism of death in the victims. So this was what Michael had found. The ash drawings on the victims’ chests were meant
to mimic the bruising that resulted from impact with a steering wheel. The drawings were a clue to the killer’s fantasy, which
somehow involved a car crash.

He remembered what Willie had said this morning about the killer claiming to have had his own near-death experience, about
some event that could have been the trigger for these murders. A car accident? A wreck in which the killer himself had suffered
a cardiac contusion? According to the book, recovery was usual if the victim received treatment in time.

He slumped back in the chair. The theory made some kind of sense. It hung together. But it didn’t explain everything. Like
exactly how a car accident linked up with fallen angels.

But that didn’t matter. He didn’t care about
how
or
why.
What he had to know was
who.

He cleared the space in front of him, pulled over the computer. Thank the gods for Talbot and his insistence that everything
be computerized. With luck he would have what he needed, could access the necessary public records.

He began with accident reports for the state of New York, compiling a three-year period to include this one. Car accidents
involving cardiac injuries. Then the cross-check. Run the list of cardiac injuries against the master list—every name that
had come up over the course of the investigation from canvass reports, interviews, printouts, all the DD-5’s.

It took him longer than expected to set it all up. But finally he ran the program … and waited.

There were several last names that tallied, but only one exact hit. A name on the list of exhibitors from the Milne gallery
matched with a car crash victim. It took more time to pull up the accident report.

A Land Rover, an older model, had hit a disabled truck. The passenger in the vehicle, a woman, had died instantly of catastrophic
head trauma. But the driver had survived multiple injuries, including an impact injury that had required resuscitation at
the scene. He stared at the name:
Adrian Lovett.
Copied the address from the gallery list.

The phone was ringing. He could feel his heart beating again, steady as a metronome against its electronic bleating. He stood
and replaced his issue weapon with the hideout gun from his ankle holster. Took out his badge.

Kelly stopped him as he passed through the squad room. “The chief’s coming down.”

He nodded, already moving again. “I left what he wants on my desk.”

Hanae sat rigid, perfectly still at the side of the bed, clutching the bedclothes around her. She had been gathering the will
to acknowledge his presence, to ask him the questions whose answers she feared, but Adrian had slipped from the room. She
had tracked his almost silent footfalls as they moved on wood and carpet; heard the quiet opening and closing of the door,
the latch turning, slipping bolt into lock.

How had she not sensed that Adrian was a threat? Why had the most dangerous thing about him seemed the kiss she’d half allowed?
She had been reckless with more than her marriage. Her hands went to her belly, to Jimmy’s child. How could she ever explain
to him what had brought her to this place? If she died, she never would.

She stood, pulling the sheet from the bed, wrapping it around her. The room was warm from the fire, but her nakedness reinforced
her vulnerability. She retraced Adrian’s footsteps to the door and tested the lock.

She had a sudden flash of memory. Exploring her uncle’s house. Hide-and-seek with her cousins. A favorite game in which she
had excelled. Her blindness, in the end, an advantage. She was aware of sounds that sighted people missed, could sense even
distant movement. She felt form and color in the energy that played against her
skin and beat at the tips of her fingers. She had sometimes wondered if the world in her head was more, not less, complete
because she could not see, her information more widely gathered. This room, this space, was alien, but she was blind, not
helpless. If there was a way out, she could find it.

The room’s one window was large but fixed. Double paned, she was sure, against the outside temperature. Still, with her hands
upon its surface, she could feel the outdoor cold. Her ear pressed against the glass, she could hear beyond the tide of her
blood nothing but a deep rural stillness. Perhaps the stillness of water.
How far have we come from the city?

She continued her search but found no phone, no clothes or anything else in the closet or the wide chest of drawers. The bedroom
had been stripped of everything that might be useful. The bathroom, too, was empty beyond the bare necessities.

She returned to sit on the bed, her arms crossed to cradle her belly. In a few short weeks, she would feel this child move
within her.

She fought the despair that tightened in her throat. Turned back the hatred for Adrian. The anger against herself. These would
not serve her. She took a pillow and moved to sit on the rug before the fire. The flames were quieter now; the logs settled
into a steady release of heat. She sat on the cushion, imaging herself before the familiar little shrine from Kyoto. Prayer
would calm her mind.

He could not call it weakness, was not ashamed of his tears. He, Adrian Lovett. No angel of the Cherubim at this moment. But
human. Mortal flesh that shuddered on the edge of the abyss.