Eden's Eyes (29 page)

"Try me," Jim invited.

For a long moment Cass was silent, and Jim feared she would remain that way. He had no way of proving he'd seen them in Ottawa. If they decided to clam up on this, it'd be his word against theirs.

Cass's thoughts warred brutally, inside of her. If she told this guy the truth he'd almost certainly think she was nuts.

And if she didn't tell him, how rough was he prepared to get in order to find out what he wanted to know? He wouldn't get physically rough, that wasn't her worry. But if he came down hard on Karen right now, mightn't she just crack like a hen's egg? How much more could she take?

Or had she been pushed too far already?

Christ, Cass admonished herself, why didn't you just haul her in to the hospital when you had the chance?

Because the girl's got her own mind, the reply came back. And you respect her. You love her.

But now the whole ball game had changed. Now Karen's life was on the line. There was a psycho out there, a killing freak to whom Karen was mysteriously and perversely linked.

And he was coming for her.

"Can you help her?" Cass asked the detective.

"I'm going to try," Jim told her. "But you've got to help me."

"She has these dreams," Cass said as she sat on the steps in the sun. "These incredible, frightening dreams. . ."

For a long while after Cass had finished, Jim Hall kept his council. The tale was too weird to be a fabrication—if they were trying to cover any complicity in the murders, then surely they'd have come up with a story slanted just a few degrees further south of The Twilight Zone—and it was too fucking weird to be true.

So where did that leave him? In the company of the most imaginative liars he'd ever met—liars who, for reasons he could not imagine, might have something to do with the murders?

Or squarely in the lap of the unknown?

He'd been exposed to psychic phenomena—if that was what this was—once before. When he was a rookie back in '68 there had been a series of disappearances in the New York gay community. It had continued for months, with up to six new missing persons reported each week. The idea of bringing in a psychic had begun as a departmental joke, the kind of gallows humor so often employed in, the force to vent some of the pent-up frustration. But as the disappearances continued, the prospect seemed less and less of a lark.

Gabe Cowan had been the man's name, a jolly, cherubic little fellow who'd put Jim in mind of a pygmy Alfred Hitchcock. They'd flown him in from the Midwest somewhere and commissioned him to help crack the case. Standing no higher than Jim's navel, Cowan had closed his eyes and fingered a scrap of cotton thought to have been snagged from the abductor's shirt. Then he'd nodded, said, "Drive me to the Bergin Falls municipal dump," and handed the fabric back. Two hours later they'd been some sixty miles south of the city, digging up shallow graves. In them they'd discovered dead homosexuals, twenty-eight of them, with their bitten-off genitals stuffed up their sewn-shut asses. An arrest was never made, but the killings suddenly stopped.

So Jim was no novice. He'd believed in it then, back in '68, because he'd been given little choice—the man had, after all, led them to a mass grave they might otherwise never have found, with no more to go on than the vibes off a worn scrap of cloth.

But a lot of years had passed since that day, and a thick crust of cynicism had encased the memory.

Behind them the screen door squeaked open.

"Sergeant Hall?"

"Yes," Jim said, turning on the step to face Albert.

"There's a call for you. From the station in Ottawa.”

Jim got up. He hadn't heard the phone ring. He went inside and used the extension at the end of the hall.

It was Don, his partner. And the news was not good.

"Empty grave?" Jim repeated in an incredulous whisper.

"That's right," Don replied from the computer room in the Ottawa station. "The sucker's body is gone. Over two weeks now. Apparently the gravesite was torn up something fierce, too. Not a neat robbery. And I chatted with the guy who drove out to tell the stiff's mother. He says she just grinned at him, like she was real pleased. He wonders if the old gal didn't root the stiff out herself, then stow it someplace. Apparently she cut a real fuss the night her son died, phoned the hospital and accused them all of murder."

Curiouser and curiouser, Jim thought.

"Anything else?"

"Possibly. They've got an unsolved homicide up in Sudbury. A surgeon. Nurse found him laying next to his car in the hospital parking lot, stabbed in the gut. . . with his hands carved off."

"Any connection?"

"Could be. The guy's name is Tucker. He removed the donor's kidney."

"I'm going to need a live-in up here," Jim said. "Round the clock. Make it a woman. A sharpshooter. I'll wait here till she arrives." He gave his partner directions. Then: "I'd better call Detective Shine in Sudbury, get him to do some of the footwork. Can you give me the number?"

Don did.

"Anything on the donor himself?"

"How long is your arm?" Don quipped, trying to add a touch of lightness to an increasingly ponderous situation. "The guy was a dork. More arrests than teeth. Drunk and disorderly, mostly, but a few assault charges and one resisting arrest."

"Wonderful. And the mother?"

"Churchgoer, according to Shine. Bible-thumper, you know the type." Jim did. His paternal grandmother had lived and died by the Book. "Shine says she flipped out totally after her son died. He interviewed some of the neighbors, and the parish priest, trying to sort out this missing corpse thing. Apparently the husband took it upon himself to sign the consent for organ retrieval. He went the way of all flesh just a few weeks later. Took a fall in the basement staircase."

Or got pushed, Jim thought immediately.

"Thanks, Don," Jim said. "Keep me posted."

"Will do," Don promised. Then the line went dead.

"There'll be a policewoman staying here with you at all times," Jim told Karen. Her complexion was still waxy, her attention span short. "She'll be wearing plain clothes, so whoever sees her will assume she's a guest. But she'll carry a gun, Karen. You'll be safe here with her. And when our man makes his move. . ."

They were sitting in the sun-drenched kitchen, sipping tea.

Cass was still outside on the parch. Albert, after much reassurance from Jim, had gone home to finish his chores. It was two o'clock in the afternoon.

Jim topped up his cup from the pot on the table between them. He offered some to Karen, who declined.

"Now," he said. "Tell me about these dreams. Every detail you can remember."

As it turned out, there wasn't a detail Karen had forgotten.

While Karen spoke, Jim leafed through his notebook, reviewing the jottings and sketches he had made regarding the killings. What interested him most, however, were the sketches, particularly the ones he'd made of the Bleeker child's room. Secretly, Jim prided himself on his drawing ability, which, when combined with his keen eye for detail, resulted in clear, almost photographic records of the crime scenes he investigated.

And as Karen described the slain child's room, right down to the paisley pattern on the bed sheets, Jim found himself looking up to be sure she wasn't peeking at his drawings.

She had been in that room sure enough—whether in body or in spirit he had, yet to determine. At this point, all he had to go on was instinct.

"And in these. . . dreams, you didn't see the killer?"

"No," Karen said, twisting the edge of her napkin. "In the dreams I was the killer."

"Did you pick up on his thoughts?" Jim asked.

"He doesn't have any," Karen replied.

She went on to describe the slaying in the alleyway. She knew everything. In detail. And the whole time she spoke, Jim's body itched with pinpoints of sweat.

Part Three - All the King's Horses

Chapter 38

Her name was Melissa Roy, and she arrived just after eight that evening in a beat-up Honda Civic. Shaking the policewoman's hand, Karen thought of how inappropriately delicate her name sounded. Heavyset and easy six feet tall, Melissa Roy moved with the lethal grace of a linebacker. Her round face was freckled and pleasant—but her eyes were like ebony buttons, dark and unreadable. She wore tight, faded jeans and a T-shirt which read i survived the beer strike of 1990.

"So you're my white knight," Karen said, finding it oddly easy to be light in the big woman's company.

Melissa smiled, showing strong, healthy teeth. "Call me Mel," she said companionably; her voice like a man's. Then, leaning closer, she whispered: "If he shows his ass around here, honey I'll blow a new hole in it."

Jim Hall, who'd intended staying on until Mel's arrival, had been called away urgently on another case. He'd left a message that he'd be back to brief the policewoman as soon as possible, later that evening or early the following day.

In the house, Karen showed Mel to the small workroom next to her bedroom, where they made up a temporary bed. Mel had packed lightly for the job, everything she needed arranged neatly in a nylon shoulder bag. Downstairs, Karen made the introductions with Cass, who had wandered off alone for a while, then the two of them set about orienting Mel further: guiding her through the house, the three outbuildings where Albert stored most of his heavier farm equipment, the grounds in a quarter-mile radius round the house. Afterward, Karen excused herself and went back upstairs to lie down. Exhaustion claimed her before the sheets were warm.

Any frail hope she'd nurtured that the dreams might have ceased was shattered as sleep overcame her.

Chapter 39

May 24

Jim Hall arrived early the following afternoon. Mel met him as he got out of his car.

"What did you find out?" she asked impatiently.

Ignoring her question, the detective climbed the porch steps and squinted into the hallway through the screen door. Sunlight flared off the polished oak floor, blinding him.

"Where's Karen?"

"Napping upstairs," Mel said, joining him on the porch. "Poor kid, she had a pretty rough night."

"I bet." The porch boards creaked beneath Jim's shifting weight. "And her friend?"

"Cass? She took off for Arnprior about an hour ago, to visit her mother. She's acting kind of antsy. Understandably. Must be hard sitting by while your best friend drops her mind."

Nodding, Jim sat on the edge of the top step, leaning back a bit to keep his eyes in the shade. Before speaking, he glanced through the screen again. He didn't want Karen to hear any of this.

"It's bad," he said at last. "Worse than I thought." He took out a copy of the donor's police record, drawn from the Ceepik computer, and handed it over to Mel, who scanned it. "The guy was a class-A loser, a drunk who liked using his fists. And from what I can gather, the mother's a real nutcase, too. Right now she's nowhere to be found, but a Sudbury detective by the name of Shine let himself into her house last night."

He described the shrine the detective had found, and the wall, papered with eyeless photos of Karen.

"Not much doubt who we're after then," Mel said.

"That's just it," Jim interjected. "There's all kinds of doubt. She's a woman in her middle fifties, crippled with arthritis and confined to a wheelchair. No way she'd have the strength to tear a man's heart out."

Mel nodded, but reluctantly. In the middle of the night Karen had told her about the glaring, blue-eyed woman at the transplant meeting.

"Her husband took it upon himself to sign the consent for the organ harvesting," Jim went on. "He wound up dead from a fall in the basement staircase less than a month following his son's burial." He regarded the policewoman squarely. "Which brings me to the bad part.

"Less than a week after that the son's grave was found empty, torn apart—"

Jim had more he wanted to tell her. Much more.

But that was all he got out.

He wanted to tell her that the gravesite had been a shambles, dirt and jagged bits of coffin strewn so widely an observer might have thought that a bomb had gone off inside of it. He wanted to tell her that the surgeon who had taken the donor's kidneys had been found murdered in the hospital parking lot, both of his hands crudely amputated at the wrists; the Sudbury police were holding a man on suspicion, a native Indian whose sister had died tragically under the surgeon's knife only hours prior to the murder—but Jim had his own ideas on that one. He wanted to tell her that he figured the old woman had an accomplice, somebody big and strong who had first dug up the son's body and hidden it, then murdered the child and the wino in order to retrieve the pirated organs. It was his Humpty Dumpty theory, and he wanted to tell her. . .

But that was all he got out because behind them the sound of a body thudding bonelessly to the floor intruded, that and a scream so frightful it cut through the heart like a chainsaw.

From the shallows of her midday slumber, Karen had heard the approaching car when it was still more than a mile away. Suddenly alert, she had stood and crossed to the window to see who it was. Despite her exhaustion, her senses remained battlefield keen, her ears alert as a watchdog's, her eyes (his) sharp as an eagle's.

By the time the car had reached Dolan's corner, she'd known whose it was—the detective's—and had started to get dressed. She wanted to know what, if anything, Hall had found out. She guessed it was something important, otherwise why would he have bothered to drive all this way? Excitement had flared with this deduction, the giddy hope that it was all at last over with, that the dream killer whose slaughterings she had so helplessly witnessed had been caught and securely locked away. . . and that the unseen cable which linked their minds had been finally, irrevocably severed.

She had reached the first landing, which gave an angled view of the screen door, when she spotted Jim Hall squinting in from the porch steps—

And something in the hard set of his jaw made her stop.

She was not meant to hear any of this, she knew that immediately—and if she went out there now, she probably never would.