Hush (20 page)

"I don't think he's the one," Ivy said.

Max looked up at her.

She shrugged. "Just a feeling," she said,
recalling how the black feeling of despair had washed over her
after she'd walked away from the man on the screen.

"We'll run his face through the database,"
Max said. "Along with all the others."

She couldn't say how many times she'd dreamed
she was back in her old Chicago apartment. Hundreds. Maybe
thousands. And in every one of those dreams, Ivy relived events
that had actually taken place—except that in the dreamscape she
always knew it was a dream . . . and she always saw the killer's
face, a face she could never remember upon awakening. Dream
therapists liked to say that every person in your dream is an
aspect of yourself. And that the dream itself is a metaphor. But
Ivy knew the dream was a mind trick, a trip back to an unthinkable
event that had redirected the course of her life.

It was also said that dreams repeat
themselves over and over until you "get it," until you learn the
lesson your subconscious is trying to teach you.

She used to think that maybe she was supposed
to see the man's face, remember his face. But how could she
remember something she'd never seen?

"This the place?" Irving asked, maneuvering
his car into position to parallel park.

Ivy looked across the street at the
five-story brick building that took up half the block. Different.
Very different. Maybe that was good.

The chipped white paint had been sandblasted
off to reveal what it had been hiding: lovely red-orange brick.
Different too was a green canvas awning that now covered the
walkway to the front door. On each side of the path, perennial
flower beds burst with color and greenery.

"It actually looks inviting," Ivy said in
amazement, her eyes still on the building as she twisted sideways
in her seat, craning her neck to see through Irving's window.

He smoothly wedged the car into a space Ivy
would never have attempted. With an efficiency of motion that she
was becoming accustomed to, he shut off the engine, and they got
out.

Max was poised to cross the four lanes that
were lined with quaint lights and divided by brightly painted
yellow lines when he noted that Ivy was hanging back, both hands
clutching a small coin purse.

She wore a red skirt that fit smoothly over
rounded hips and fell to her knees. Her legs were bare. On her feet
were the leather shoes she almost always wore. Her top was black,
knit, and slightly fitted.

He stared at her.

Then stared some more.

"Forget the meter," he said.

"No. ... I better put in some money." She
began digging around, and that's when he realized she was
stalling.

He squeezed between car bumpers to join her
on the sidewalk. He caught her elbow and she looked up at him with
her short red bangs and lips the color of her skirt. Was she doing
something different? Wearing more makeup or something?

"We don't have to do this," he told her.

She slipped a quarter in the meter. "I don't
want you to get a ticket."

"Not the parking meter—and by the way, I
won't have to pay the ticket. I mean this." He motioned in the
direction of the looming apartment complex.

She glanced at the building, then back at
him, and he could see when the realization of what she was doing
hit her. She smiled self-consciously, laughed a little, then
snapped the small container closed and slipped it into a tiny black
leather bag she wore as a kind of low-slung belt.

She turned away slightly and put a hand to
her forehead, almost as if to shield her eyes from what was out
there. Then she ran her fingers through her bangs and blew out a
breath. "The mission's gone. It used to be right there." She
pointed.

"Chicago's changed a lot in the last sixteen
years."

"And the apartment. It doesn't even look like
the same place."

"Maybe that's good."

"Why would they get rid of the mission?"

"They built a new one. Over on Lourdes. It
can sleep a hundred people."

"Oh. Well. That's good."

"We don't have to do this," he said
again.

She checked for traffic, then stepped off the
curb and strode across the street with Max quickly catching up,
falling into step beside her as they went up the walk.

"I have to do this." She paused. "Don't
worry. I'm not going to fall apart on you."

He put up both hands. "Never said you were.
Never even thought it."

But of course he had. Scene of the crime.
Scene of the place where a serial killer had plunged a knife into
her and murdered her infant son. In that setting, a breakdown was
almost a requirement.

Inside the lobby, they rang the building
manager. A man's voice answered.

"CPD," Max said into the speaker.

"What?"

"Police Department. Homicide."

The buzzer went off, giving them immediate
entry. The office was right inside the set of security doors. A
small, worried-looking man got up from his desk as they stepped
inside.

"Homicide?" he asked, his eyes round, his
hands moving frantically in front of him. "Who's dead? Who's been
killed?"

Max flashed his badge, then slipped it back
into his pocket. "Nobody. Not recently, anyway. We just want to
look at one of the apartments."

"283," Ivy added.

"283?" the man asked. "Why?"

"Police business."

"Is someone living in it?" Ivy asked.

"We use it for storage. It hasn't been rented
for years." He stopped abruptly, then began to wave his finger at
Max. "Those murders. That's what this is about. Those women. The
babies. I'm not supposed to tell the tenants, but 283 is the room
where a woman and her baby were killed years ago. After it
happened, nobody would live there so it was turned into storage.
Even after the remodeling project five years ago, when everybody
had forgotten about the Madonna Murderer, we decided to leave it as
storage."

"How long have you worked here?" Max
asked.

"I started when the place was remodeled."

"Has anyone ever asked to rent that specific
room?"

"Rent it?"

The man had an annoying habit of answering a
question with a question. "I don't think so. Wait. The manager here
before me told me that some guy wanted to rent 283. He didn't even
care if it still had blood on the walls."

"Would you have the guy's name?"

"Maybe. If he filled out an application."

"Check that out for me, will you? And the
name of the previous manager. I'll need that too."

"He's old. Really old. Like nursing-home old.
Was losing his marbles when I started here."

"I'd like to talk to him anyway."

"Yeah, okay. I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks."

"Wanna see the apartment? Wait. I'll grab the
key."

A minute later they were taking a creaky
elevator up to the second floor, then the man was scurrying along
the hallway toward 283.

Everything was new. New paint, new wallpaper,
new red carpet, new light fixtures. But the floor under Ivy's feet
was still uneven, still bowed from years and years of weight and
shuffling feet. And the hallway, which went on and on, still seemed
off, as if the perspective wasn't just right.

Too soon they were standing in front of room
283. The door was the same door, now painted green instead of
sticky varnished brown. But with a new door handle, new lock, new
discount-store metal-punched numbers.

The apartment manager unlocked the door and
pushed it open. All three of them stood there, looking inside.

Ivy's heart dropped.

The remodeling project hadn't included room
283.

Irving's voice drifted in her direction from
what seemed like another dimension, muffled, indistinct. "Could you
leave us to look around?"

Another voice responded. "What? Oh. Oh,
sure." Then came a shuffling, followed by the closing of the
elevator doors.

With feet that seemed mired in mud, Ivy
stepped forward into the room. Her heart was beating so rapidly
that she distantly wondered if she might have a heart attack.
Wouldn't that be strange? To die here? To come full circle like
that?

The first thing that hit her was the smell.
That creepy old-building smell, mingling with odors of all the
people who had ever slept on the multitude of stained mattresses
stacked against one wall, and all the people who had ever sat on
the four porcelain toilets that were in various stages of decay. It
smelled like stale sweat and urine and fabric that held the dust,
skin sloughings, and mites of a hundred years.

Ivy edged past one of the toilets that was
lying on its side like a wounded soldier.

"Quite a place," Irving commented, picking
his way past a stack of linen and chenille bedspreads that looked
as if they came from the fifties.

It was an efficiency, set up in much the same
way as Ivy's current apartment. Directly inside the door was a
kitchen and sleeping area, the rust-stained sink stacked with
plumbing and electrical supplies along with long, narrow boxes that
held fluorescent bulbs. There was no living room.

The bed was still there.

Next to the window the Madonna Murderer had
escaped through. No sheets. No blanket. Just a stained, striped
mattress. The same mattress?

She couldn't move any closer.

Her gaze shifted to the left of the bed,
where the bassinet had stood. It was gone, thank God. The broken
lamp was gone, and the shattered snow globe. But the mattress. The
stained mattress. Was it the same one? If so, why in the hell
hadn't they gotten rid of it?

Even though she'd imagined standing in this
exact spot hundreds of times in both her dreams and waking hours,
nothing could have prepared her for the reality of it.

Why hadn't they gutted the room? Left the way
it was, it seemed almost a monument to the horrors that had gone on
there. A place forever locked in time.

"Do you think he was the one who wanted to
rent this room?" she asked, feeling no need to explain who "he"
was.

"Maybe. Maybe not. Could have just been
someone who wanted to be able to say he lived here. Like people
always wanting to spend the night in the room where John Belushi
died."

"I'm not anybody famous."

"Humans are morbidly curious as long as it
has nothing to do with them."

She was beginning to calm down. Her heart
wasn't beating so rapidly.

Seeming to sense that she'd gotten a grip on
her emotions, Irving asked, "Does this trigger any new memories?
Anything you may have forgotten?"

Images flashed in her mind. A man in a dark
hood bending over her baby.

"No crying," she said. "My baby wasn't
crying."

She ran a tongue over her dry lips. "The
killer, he was standing there. Over the bassinet. I turned on the
light, and saw him."

"Did he look up when you turned on the light?
Do you remember his face?"

She took a deep breath and concentrated very
hard, then finally shook her head. "He would have looked up,
wouldn't he have?"

Irving shrugged in a way that said he
probably agreed. "You'd think so."

He seemed so out of place in the killing
room. He was part of her new life, not the old. "Hypnotize me," she
said.

"What?"

She could see that he thought he must have
misunderstood.

"I know you're a qualified hypnotist. I know
that you once caught a rapist by hypnotizing his victim."

"I didn't do it where the actual crime took
place. And it was a long time ago."

"I'd think the scene of the crime might be
the best place." She tipped her head, watching him closely. "Are
you worried that I'll flip out? Go crazy?"

"Is this what you had in mind to begin with?
And you knew I wouldn't go along with it if you told me back at
Headquarters?"

He was a hundred percent correct. "Look." She
held out her hands to show him that she wasn't shaking. "I'm not
afraid."

"That makes one of us."

"Wow. A man who admits when he's scared. I'm
impressed."

"I haven't hypnotized anybody in years."

"I trust you."

"I don't want you to have to relive your
baby's death."

Ivy chewed on her lip and looked away, her
eyes not staring at walls with bloodstains that looked like rust,
but into the past. Her brows drew together and she rubbed her
forehead with fingers that turned white from the pressure.

"You okay?"

"Yeah." She pulled in a deep breath and
squared her shoulders. "Yeah." She waved her hand with a
distracted, dismissive air, then sucked in another deep breath. "I
have to do this."

Without waiting for his consent, fearing it
might never come, she dropped to the stained mattress, then lay
down, hands on her stomach, eyes closed, head where a pillow should
have been.

Max had seen a lot of weird things in his
days as a homicide detective, so why did the image of her pale face
against its grisly backdrop give him such chills?

And how could he say no to something that
might help the case, that might help catch the Madonna
Murderer?

From the chaos in the room, he located a
vinyl- covered kitchen chair and placed it near the bed. Then he
sat and began to coax Ivy into a hypnotic state, leading her down a
long flight of stairs that would take her deeper and deeper into
her subconscious. They were halfway down the steps when he suddenly
stopped.

With her eyes closed, she frowned, waiting
for him to continue.

"You know what?" he said, putting his hands
on his knees. "I'm not going to do this."

Her eyes flew open.

"Why not?"

"We'll do it the right way. In a neutral
environment. With a video camera and tape recorder." He couldn't
believe he'd almost let her talk him into it. "This is wrong. Too
fucking creepy."