What the Night Knows (26 page)

According to Brenda, she stumbled, fell against some cabinets, and shot herself after killing her brother. Lionel and the lab boys found it
difficult to believe that a woman proficient enough with a handgun to put three centralized rounds in a man at a distance of even just fifteen feet would accidentally shoot herself in the chest.

Furthermore, though Reese might be a hothead, he had managed to conduct more than a decade of criminal enterprise with only one arrest and one conviction. Even if, as Brenda had said, he molested their younger sister, Jean, when he was a teenager, reason argued that he would have tried to get to his niece in a way that was as circumspect as his behavior with Jean—and more in accord with the weasely business with the wristwatch. Reese cared too much about Reese to try to kidnap the niece by launching a reckless assault on the entire Woburn family.

Leaving the kitchen to the techs, the uniforms outside chasing away curious neighbors and swapping bullshit stories, Lionel walked the rest of the downstairs, touching nothing, studying everything. He was troubled that the facts of the shooting scenario were beads on a string of irrationality and therefore, though facts, were worth no more than the weak filament on which they were strung.

Something else bothered him, too, but he couldn’t identify the source of his uneasiness until, standing in the dining room, he saw movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to watch the pendant crystals swaying on the simple chandelier above the table. In the absence of a draft, with no vibration to be felt or heard, the easy pendulum motion of the crystals seemed inexplicable. Perhaps more curious was the lack of uniformity in their arcs: some swung north-south, some east-west, others to different points of the compass. The crystals slowed and stopped as he watched—and then he turned toward a noise behind him. It was a mere rustle, it could have been anything or nothing, but some quality of it caused his neck hairs to prickle. He realized that in addition to the weaknesses
in the crime scenario, the other thing that bothered him was the house.

He did not know what he meant by that.

Some houses had a history that colored your feeling about them: murder houses, for instance, in which innocents had been tortured and slaughtered. The shootings in the kitchen didn’t qualify because they were too clean, insufficiently perverse. Lionel knew nothing about the history of this house, and based on the impression that Lenny and Davinia made on him, he doubted this was a family with dark secrets.

A house could subtly abrade your nerves if the proportions of its rooms were wrong, if the colors were harsh, if items of furniture clashed with one another. But this architecture was harmonious, the colors pleasant, the furniture homey and of a kind.

Waiting for the rustle to repeat, Lionel knew what bothered him about the house: a feeling of being watched. In spite of having been railroaded for murder and having spent six years in prison, he wasn’t prone to paranoia. In his work, he relied on a sober instinct for danger, and the only thing that plucked his fear wire was the thought of losing his mom or one of the aunts who lived with him.

Overhead, floorboards creaked as someone crossed an upstairs room. The family was at the hospital. The criminalists were in the kitchen and had no reason to venture to the second floor.

He returned to the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, listening. A soft thump might have been a door closing above or only a settling noise. Another thump.

Lionel ascended to the second floor and conducted a casual but thorough search. The room doors were all open or ajar, and he toed or elbowed them wider, to pass through. Light switches chased darkness but nothing else, no intruder.

The final room at the end of the hall seemed to be Davinia’s. The decor was feminine but not frilly, almost austere. Her books proved to be of a more serious nature than he might have expected.

She had been doing homework at a table that served as her desk. Her computer remained on.

The screen saver consisted of ceaselessly shifting shapes in gold, red, and a variety of blues. He had never seen anything quite like it, and in fact it was beautiful, worth watching for a minute, almost mesmerizing.

Although he expected the shapes to remain mysterious, fluid and continuously changing, the blues and golds suddenly coalesced into a handprint on a purling red background, as though someone flattened a palm against the inner face of the screen.

Lionel found himself in the desk chair without realizing that he had sat down. He watched, almost as an observer of someone else’s action, as his right hand moved forward to match itself to the handprint on the screen.

On contact, Lionel felt a cold quivering against his palm and spread fingers, merely an odd vibration at first, but quickly growing into a vigorous squirming sensation, as if his hand were pressed against a mass of newborn snakes. Just as his curiosity gave way to alarm, something nipped lightly at the pad of his thumb, a fang prick but not a full bite, as if one of the imagined serpents were testing his susceptibility to their venom. He snatched his hand away from the screen and shot up from the chair.

No puncture marked his thumb.

He was as disturbed by his expectation of a wound as by the phantom nip. His revulsion at the cold squirming sensation lingered although he had touched nothing worse than a smooth glass surface. Intellectually, he understood that the foul sensation of squirming serpents
must have been the consequence of some rare kind of static charge, but he still felt as though he had touched something alien and vile.

The shapes on the computer were amorphous once more. Lionel watched for five minutes, waiting for the handprint to appear again, assuming that it must be a programmed feature of the screen saver, but his vigil went unrewarded. Finally, he switched off the system in case there might be an electrical problem with it.

In the upstairs hall, he stood listening.

He still felt watched.

Lionel Timmins wondered if he had been working too hard lately.

33

ALTHOUGH HE COULD DO NOTHING TO IDENTIFY AND PROTECT the family at risk, indeed
because
of his helplessness, John Calvino knew sleep would elude him. He sat in a library armchair, trying to lose himself in the latest book by one of his favorite authors, but his mind would not relent from its obsession. He read page after page, turned from chapter to chapter, but the story failed to become as vivid to him as the memory of what Alton Blackwood had done to the Sollenburgs, the homicides that might this night be repeated.

At eleven-thirty, he put the book aside and phoned the Robbery-Homicide watch commander to learn if anyone had been called out on an unusual 187—murder—during the evening. He seldom checked in like this, but his call was not entirely out of character, either. Only anxiety, not intuition, compelled him to pick up the phone.

The thirty-third day did not begin for another half an hour, but Blackwood’s crimes two decades earlier twice bridged the midnight hour. For whatever reason he kept to a thirty-three-day schedule, the killer sometimes failed to wait for that magic day to arrive. His desire,
his need, his
hunger
for violence could drive him to an early start, though he always finished his work according to his sacred calendar.

When John learned from the watch commander about the shootings at the Woburn house hours earlier, he knew this could be the one,
must
be the one, even if it seemed to have gone wrong for Blackwood. The Sollenburgs and the Woburns were both families of four; in each instance, the parents were shot; and the Woburns had one son and one daughter, just like the Sollenburgs.

He turned off the lights in the library and hurried upstairs to tell Nicky that he was going out on a case, which was not a lie even if it might not be strictly the truth. This case was not his, but it
was
Lionel’s case, according to the watch commander. And John had a legitimate—if personal—interest in it even if he had completed little more than half of his thirty-day leave, about which he had
also
managed to tell Nicky neither the truth nor a lie.

Her studio was dark, and in the master bedroom, John found her sound asleep in the soft light of her bedside lamp. On her nightstand stood an empty brandy snifter beside a copy of the complete poems of T. S. Eliot, which she had read often.

She failed to stir when he whispered her name. He wrote a note and placed it in the empty brandy glass.

Sleeping, Nicolette looked as innocent as a child, and if the only transgressions that counted were those done with the
intent
to transgress, then she was perhaps as blameless as the children she had brought into the world.

At half past midnight, when John arrived in the ICU visitors’ lounge at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Jack Woburn’s sister Lois was text-messaging a status report to relatives. The exhausted boy slept on a thinly padded three-seat couch.

The daughter stood at a window, gazing out at the night and the
city. She turned to John, and he knew beyond doubt that the Woburns were meant to be the family with which the Sollenburg murders would be restaged. Blackwood was consecrated to the ritualistic destruction of what was both beautiful and innocent, two qualities of this girl, as they had been qualities also of John’s lost sisters, Marnie and Giselle.

As he introduced himself to Davinia, his voice trembled and broke, so that she must have wondered why the suffering of her family—strangers to him—should evoke such emotion. He could not tell her that he was thankful for her survival not only as anyone should be thankful that the life of another was spared, but also because her escape from their otherworldly enemy gave him hope that his family might likewise be saved.

When Lois completed her BlackBerry message, she shared with John the news she texted to relatives. Brenda Woburn had undergone a forty-five-minute surgery for her gunshot wound, had come through brilliantly, and had recovered from anesthesia. She was lying now in an ICU bed. They expected soon to be allowed to see her for a few minutes. Jack Woburn remained in surgery, his prognosis grave.

John sat with them, hopeful that after the children had been allowed to see their mother, he would be permitted a couple of minutes with her, as well.

The four uniformed officers, who are dealing with onlookers, return to the house one at a time to check on the progress of the techs or to use the half bath off the ground-floor hall. Patrolmen, technicians, crime-lab photographer, morgue-wagon jockeys all touch doorknobs, doors, and door casings not directly related to the crime scene.
They touch the flush on the half-bath toilet, faucet handles, light switches. By these contacts, they are known and assessed.

All are more accessible than Lionel Timmins, two offer easy mounts, and the easier of these is Andy Tane, a uniformed patrolman. Andy sometimes uses the threat of arrest to receive free services from prostitutes, scouts teenage runaways for pimps, and takes a finder’s fee for each girl he conveys to them. When he was little, his mother called him Andy Candy. He likes the hookers to call him that, as well, when he uses them. He also accepts bribes from other criminal entrepreneurs either for pretending to be unaware of their activities or for actively assisting them.

Andy Candy Tane is known in full when he enters the house by the front door to use the half bath. When he flushes the toilet, he is
taken
, which in his case is by far the most appropriate moment. Andy is tall and strong, thirty-six, a worthy horse for the ride ahead.

After the morgue wagon departs with the body of Reese Salsetto, only one pair of uniforms is needed until the criminalists leave and Lionel Timmins locks the house. Andy Tane and his partner, Mickey Scriver, are the first unit released from the scene.

Andy and Mickey are on a four-day-a-week, forty-hour schedule—cruising the streets, on the lookout for bad guys, catching calls as they come—from 6:00 P.M. until 4:00 A.M. They usually take a dinner break at eight if they’re not in the middle of a collar or responding to a priority code.

They have been together only two weeks; and though Mickey is still trying to figure out if the partnership will work, Andy already prefers a change, a partner more flexible, more
nuanced
. Mickey is ex-army, his head full of self-limiting words like
honor
and
duty
. He’s ambitious, intending to make a rep in this rolling-blue work and then move up to plainclothes, possibly the narcotics bureau, not because
the big bribes are there, which is why Andy might consider it if he were ambitious, but because that is where the action is. Mickey Scriver likes action. He wants to do work that “makes a difference in the community.” Andy loathes action as much as he loathes the community; and he would by now loathe Mickey if not for his sense of humor.

Andy’s previous partner, Vin Wasco, had been on the take, too, which made it a lot easier for Andy to conduct his own business. But Vin has gone under the knife for a benign brain tumor. Although doctors say he will make a complete recovery, Andy will be amazed and disappointed if Vin doesn’t fake himself into a full, lifetime disability pension.