Evidence of Blood

“Cook is a master, precise and merciless, at showing the slow-motion shattering of families and relationships…
The Chatham School Affair
ranks with his best.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Intelligent …compassionate …surprising.”

—The Boston Sunday Globe

“Cook uses the genre to open a window onto the human condition…. Literate, compelling …Events accelerate with increasing force, but few readers will be prepared for the surprise that awaits at novel’s end.”

—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Thomas Cook is an artist, a philosopher, and a magician; his story is spellbinding.”

—The Drood Review of Mystery

“Cook is one of the most lyrical of today’s novelists. His prose flows effortlessly, yet beneath its rhythm Cook’s characters perform the most shocking and deadly of deeds…. An extraordinary writer.”

—Sun
, Calgary, Alberta

“[Cook’s] portrait of a small—and ultimately small-minded—town is a skillful one. And just when you think the puzzle is complete, Cook artfully presents yet another piece—rearranging all your expectations.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“Cook has crafted a novel of stunning power, with a climax that is so unexpected the reader may think he has cheated. But there is no cheating here, only excellent storytelling.”

—
Booklist

“Cook’s writing is distinguished by finely cadenced prose, superior narrative skills, and the author’s patient love for the doomed characters who are the object of his attention…. Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal
(starred review)

“Cook builds a family portrait in which violence seems both impossible and inevitable. One of
[Mortal Memory’s]
greatest accomplishments is the way it defies expectations …surprising and devastating.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Cook’s night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“A gifted novelist, intelligent and compassionate.”

—Joyce Carol Oates,
The New York Review of Books

Fiction
^*
THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR
^*
BREAKHEART HILL
^*
MORTAL MEMORY
THE CITY WHEN IT RAINS
NIGHT SECRETS
STREETS OF FIRE
FLESH AND BLOOD
SACRIFICIAL GROUND
THE ORCHIDS
TABERNACLE
ELENA
BLOOD INNOCENTS

Nonfiction
EARLY GRAVES
BLOOD ECHOES

and coming in hardcover
in September 1998
^*
INSTRUMENTS OF NIGHT
Look for it at your favorite bookstore

He’d seen shadows of his own. Hers did not surprise him. It was only surprising how often they recurred, as if something in the mind still insisted that it had never really happened. Daphne Moore had seen one pass her bedroom window with something large and bulky in its hand. It had been tall and slender when Ellen Ferry had seen it glide swiftly across her closet door. Wyndham Knight had only glimpsed a head and shoulders as they skirted along the bright blue surface of her lighted, nightbound pool. Try as he had, he’d never been able to imagine what little Billy Flynn had seen.

“So you saw his shadow first?”

She nodded slowly, ponderously, as if underwater. “It came up from behind me. He was real close. Then he opened the door on the driver’s side. He said, ‘Get in. Get in, or you’re dead.’ Something like that. Then he came in after me, sort of pushing me in, you know?”

“Did he speed away?”

“No. He was going slow, like he didn’t want to attract attention, and he was doing everything like he’d really studied about it, very, very …” She searched for the word. He did his job, found it for her.

“Methodical?”

“Yeah, like that.”

Her voice was weak, her eyes slightly diverted, a shy maiden reluctantly going over the unseemly details. He
could sense her groping through the tale, hesitant, disordered, whole segments lost or out of sequence.

“I stayed in the frontseat, where he put me. I didn’t know what else to do.”

His pencil whispered softly as it glided across the lined yellow paper of his notebook. All around, the world seemed very still, despite the patter of the rain against her window, the sounds of traffic moving along the nearby street. It was a stillness that seemed to radiate out from her testimony in a cold, numbing wave.

Her eyes drifted to the window, then about the room, before finally returning to him. It was a gesture that reminded him of someone who could have been a nun, perhaps should have been a nun, secure in a cloistered life, beyond the reach of shadows.

“I was sitting up. I could see everything. It was at night. But I could see things.”

She seemed mildly surprised by the fact that she’d never been pressed down onto the floorboard or locked in the trunk, that she’d been sitting up for the whole ride, as if she were his wife, sister, girlfriend. She considered it for a moment. “I saw people. It was dark, but we passed people walking down the road.” She shrugged slightly. “But there was nothing they could do.”

Kinley nodded. He’d heard this before, too, and always with the same tone of irony and unreality.
How could other people be so near, and yet so far away?
Patricia Quinn had passed three security guards as she was led down the corridor toward the room in which she would be slaughtered. Felicia Sanchez had seen her mother approach the house and peer toward the wrong bedroom window for a moment before going on her way. In those who survived their experiences of sudden, mortal danger, there was always a sense of being in and out of the world at the same time, a feeling that time had stopped, that everything had suddenly gone mute and motionless, except for the rope’s flapping ends, the crack of the belt, the slight nudge of the muzzle.

“Did you talk to him?”

“I guess I did, but I don’t know what I said. I guess I was asking him things. Like: ‘Why?’ Like: ‘Why are you doing this?’”

She flicked a bit of ash into the small plastic ashtray on the table, and the gentle, retiring nun disappeared. Now she was just a jittery woman with dry skin and a Death Valley emptiness in her eyes. The universal victim. She could be a battered wife sucking at her broken fingernail or a factory worker slumped in a fat recliner. The falling ash would fall in exactly the same way, the mouth tighten into the same red scar. It was a look he’d seen a thousand times: the eyes closing languidly as if indifferent to the lash; the head drooping very slightly, ready for the axe; then, inevitably, the eyes opening again, though vacant and passionless, as if any remaining rage would be dismissed as self-indulgence, even by the drowsy reporter taking down the tale.
It’s all ashes, ashes. Who really gives a shit about what happened to me?

Kinley made his own stage move, pretending to write something in his notebook as he glanced about the room, taking in its small details. He had always assumed that if God was in the details, then Satan must be in them too, leering unrepentantly from a pile of tangled sheets or from behind a spent ring of masking tape. His experience had taught him that nothing betrayed the quirkiness of the mind more than the odd minutiae of crime: the pasteboard box Perry had laid Mr. Cutter on to keep him comfortable until he cut his throat; the can of deodorant Whitman had taken with him to the Texas Tower, not wanting to offend; the little Christmas ornament Mildred Haskell had dangled out the door to coax in Billy Flynn.

As his eyes moved about the room, he could feel them gather in its small details. It had always been this way, his mind, a thing that feasted on the tiniest particulars. The apartment it inventoried now was a kingly banquet. There was a large, slightly faded doily on the boxy television. The lamp on top of it resembled a small mound of sea-shells
or various other beach droppings, all of them glued together and polished to a glassy sheen. In a far bedroom, he could see part of the wooden bed frame, and a bit of the wallpaper behind it, English fox-hunting scenes, red jackets, horses, dogs. He remembered similar wallpaper in the little house where he’d grown up, only it had been a Southern scene, little girls in bonnets and hoopskirts dancing on a vast green lawn. Tara, his grandmother had called it, though always with that arctic smile.

Other walls, other rooms had suggested other things: the illuminated Christ that hung over Wilma Jean Comstock’s bed (how fervently she must have prayed to it during the hours it took for Colin Bright to kill her); the pentagram in Mildred Haskell’s dripping smokehouse (what must little Billy Flynn have thought?); the life-sized, semen-stained diagram of internal organs that Willie Connors had slept with before trying the real thing (had Wyndham Knight seen that?). He wondered what his grandmother would have called such adornments had she seen them as he had seen them, live, in living color.

His eyes returned to the witness. “Did he ever mention why he was doing any of this?” he asked.

She shook her head determinedly. “No, no, he never said anything like that.”

Kinley brought his pencil to attention. “Okay, just tell me what happened after you got in the car.”