What the Night Knows (4 page)

He took off his raincoat, shook it, and folded it over his left arm because the only other place to put it was a glider with stained yellow cushions. After Billy finished with his sister and called 911, he had come to the front porch and had sat on the glider, naked and drenched in blood.

In most jurisdictions, after attaining the age of fourteen, children are presumed to have sufficient capacity to form criminal intent. Neither moral nor emotional insanity—as distinguished from mental—exempts the perpetrator from responsibility for his crimes.

To the first two police officers on the scene, Billy offered his sister for ten dollars each and told them where she could be found. “Just leave twenty bucks on the nightstand,” he said. “And don’t have a cigarette after. This house is a no-smoking zone.”

Now the police-department seal had been peeled off the front door. Two days previously, long after the criminalists collected trace evidence and prints, after a review of that evidence supported Billy’s confession in every detail, after the boy was evaluated by psychiatrists, and after he was remanded to the state hospital under a preliminary finding of insanity to be reaffirmed or reconsidered in sixty days, the house ceased to be an active crime scene.

No one from the department would have come by merely to remove the seals from the exterior doors. Because the Lucases had no family nearby, perhaps an attorney, serving as executor, had been here to review the condition of the house.

John used the key with the dangling cat charm. He went inside, closed the door, and stood in the foyer, listening to this home that had become a slaughterhouse.

He possessed no authority to enter these premises. Technically, the case file remained open until Billy could be evaluated in sixty days, but the investigation was inactive. Anyway, this had never been John’s assignment.

If he’d been unable to discover a neighbor with a key, his only alternative would have been to force entry. He would have done it.

With his back against the front door, he sensed that someone waited for him in one of the surrounding rooms, but this was a false perception. In other murder houses, after the bodies were removed and the evidence collected, when he returned alone to consider the scene in solitude, he usually experienced this disturbing impression of a presence looming, but it always proved to be unfounded.

6

THUNDER NO LONGER ROARED, AND THE RAIN SUBSIDED FROM drumming torrents to a drizzle too soft to press a whisper through the walls.

According to the real-estate records at the county assessor’s office, the residence had six main rooms on the ground floor, five on the upper level. As John stood in the dusky foyer, the house felt larger than described. The hollow silence had a quality of vastness, as of caverns coiling countless miles through deep strata of stone.

Eight-pane sidelights flanked the front door, but the mummified sun, enwrapped by sodden clouds, would soon be setting.

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He intended to turn on as few lights as possible.

Sometimes the visible aftermath of violence so disturbed him that he couldn’t properly work the scene. One gang thug capping another in a territorial dispute never fazed him. An investigation involving a murdered family brought him to the brink.

He wasn’t here in an official capacity. This was personal. Therefore, shadows wouldn’t hamper him. Shadows soothed.

Compassion and pity were desirable in a homicide detective. In some cases, however, a capacity for intense empathy tended to depress and to discourage rather than to motivate.

In spite of his sometimes anguished identification with victims, John could have been nothing but what he was. He became a detective not because he thought the job glamorous or because the benefits were generous. He felt
compelled
to follow that path. His career became a necessity; no alternative existed either in thought or in fact.

Ahead, on the left, a gray glow might have defined an archway to a living room. Above, a window on the stairwell landing admitted just enough daylight to suggest a handrail, balusters.

Soon his dark-adapted eyes identified the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He draped his raincoat over it.

From an inner sport-coat pocket, he produced a compact LED flashlight, but he did not at once switch it on.

He wasn’t seeking nuances of crime-scene conditions critical to a prosecution. The premises had been well-tramped; what evidence once existed had been gathered or contaminated, or obliterated.

What he sought was more ephemeral this time, more elusive: a keener intuition than the one on which he currently operated, some insight, some revelation, an enlightenment that would either confirm or put to rest his hunch that the Lucas family would be only the first of four to be massacred.

John followed the dark hall to the kitchen, where the door and casing had been removed to accommodate a wheelchair. The windows were curtained with translucent fabric that filtered the dismal light.

A rancid smell halted him one step past the threshold.

The flashlight fanned a wheelchair near the breakfast bar, the chair in which Billy’s mother died when he slammed the knife through her throat.

Now on the floor in front of the fridge, the LED beam revealed the source of the odor. A quart of spilled milk marbled with the mother’s blood had congealed into a yellow-and-purple scum peppered with patches of mold. The mess glistened, still not entirely dry.

According to Billy’s confession, his mother tried to scream but couldn’t raise more than a rasp-and-rattle, a whistling wheeze. She could not summon the help of other family members—or warn them.

As if those sounds had been recorded on the walls, John heard them, imagined in his mind’s ear but as real to him as the thunder earlier and as his wife’s voice would be when he went home to her.

Sandra Lucas had been disabled in a traffic accident. She coped elegantly with her new circumstances but also volunteered to counsel others in her condition. She gave motivational speeches stressing the importance of family, the strength a spouse could provide, and the reward of being an example of grace and courage for your children.

She bled to death, but drowned, too, from aspirated blood.

The radiant green numerals in the digital clock on the oven had displayed the correct time. Now, inexplicably, the numerals began to flash midnight or noon.

Maybe the electrical service failed for a moment, requiring that the clock be reset. Because he had not switched on any house lights, he wouldn’t have been aware of a brief power outage.

He watched the numbers flashing. He watched them and wondered.

The rancid odor seemed to intensify.

After backing away from the odor but not all the way out of the past into the present, John went next to the study. Here, Robert Lucas had been bludgeoned with a hammer while paying bills.

Robert’s desk was along the far wall, facing a window, so that he
could look up from his work to enjoy a view of the three paper birches in the yard. This put his back to the study door.

Darkness shrank from the flashlight beam, and a collage appeared on top of the desk: an artful scattering of envelopes, invoices, and a sheet of postage stamps against a desk-blotter background, all of it unevenly glazed with a lacquer once bright red, now red-black and rust and purple.

In his audio imaginarium, John Calvino heard nothing of Robert’s death cries, perhaps because the first blow had rendered the man unconscious before a sound could escape him.

The flashlight found a spattered pen set on a white marble base, a sprayed windowsill, spotted draperies. The spatter, the spray, and the spotting comprised a kind of scream, a shrill shriek that seemed to arise in John’s bones, but this was not a sound that had been made by the victim; this was his own unvoiced cry of moral revulsion.

As he retreated from the study into the hallway, he thought he heard a jingling of tiny bells, a cold silvery sound lasting but an instant. He became as still as any living thing could be still.

The flashlight beam did not quiver on the mahogany floor.

In the sidelights that flanked the front door, the panes of glass were nearly as dark as the wooden muntins that separated them from one another. The sun had sunk far down the gullet of the storm.

John could not be sure that the sound had been real. He might have summoned it from memory, from twenty years in the past.

He went to the living room, from where the ringing might have come. The double doors—added to the archway after Sandra’s accident, to convert this space to a ground-floor bedroom—stood wide open. Bedclothes had been neatly turned down, but Sandra had died before retiring for the night. No one, with or without bells, waited there.

John had no interest in any remaining ground-floor rooms. No one had been murdered in them. The stairs did not creak. At the landing, he paused to gather his resolve.

The worst would be on the second floor. The mother and father had died quickly. But upstairs, the grandmother and the sister had struggled and suffered. Their cries would come to him.

On the landing wall, a print of John Singer Sargent’s
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
was spectacular even in the cold LED beam. Two lovely little girls in white dresses were lighting Chinese lanterns under a bower of lilies, in a twilight English garden.

Perhaps the most charming painting of the entire nineteenth century, the scene had often elicited a smile from John when he came upon it in books of art. He didn’t smile this time.

As he turned from the picture, he had the impression that one of the girls was sprayed with blood. When he looked again, the blush on her face proved to be light from the Chinese lantern in her hands.

Upstairs, John went to the grandmother’s quarters at the front of the house, on the left side of the hall. The door stood open.

No dishwater daylight leaked through the heavy draperies. A combination night-light and air-freshener emitted a peach-colored glow and the fragrance of carnations.

Except for the punch that, to her grandson’s amusement, knocked out her false teeth, the assault on Ann Lucas had been bloodless. The aftermath John dreaded waited not here but in the sister’s room.

He flicked a switch, lighting a lamp. Half the grandmother’s room still lay in shadow. Tangled bedclothes trailed onto the floor.

On the dresser stood a collection of framed photographs. Six featured Billy alone or with others of his family. His open face seemed untouched by deceit. His eyes revealed no hint of dementia.

Celine, the sister, had a face made for mirrors and a smile of such
innocence that she looked as if she knew nothing of death and everything of eternity. In a swimsuit at the shore, surf breaking around her ankles, she seemed to be a sprite spun from spray and sunlight. John couldn’t bear to look at her.

A taped outline on the carpet marked the position in which the grandmother’s body was found. In his confession, Billy had described punching her out as she sat in bed watching TV, dragging her to the floor, and waiting for her to revive before killing her face-to-face.

Staring at the taped outline, John expected to hear desperate sounds of death by strangulation—but he heard instead the silvery tintinnabulation of tiny bells, clear and icy. The tinkling lasted longer than before, perhaps two or even three seconds, and he knew this time the bells were real, not imagined.

In the subsequent brittle silence, he stepped into the hallway and switched on the ceiling fixture. The beveled-glass bowl speared that space with blue-edged blades of light.

Directly across from the grandmother’s quarters, the door to the sister’s room stood ajar. Darkness beyond.

Again, the bells. Two seconds, three.

He pocketed the extinguished flashlight and drew the pistol from his shoulder rig.

7

CLEARING A DOORWAY UNDER THREAT WAS ALWAYS THE worst. He pushed through fast, found the switch, pistol in one hand but then in both as light bloomed in a pair of bedside lamps. Left to right, head and gun tracking as one, registering few details of the room, focusing instead on target identification and places where someone might be concealed.

A closet offered the only possibility. Two sliding mirrored doors. Approaching himself and the black bore of his weapon, gun in one hand again, reaching toward the door, toward his own reaching reflection, sliding his second self aside. He found only hanging clothes, shoes, boxes on a high shelf.

He still believed the silvery ringing had been real.

He slid the door shut and looked past his reflection at the room behind him, which seemed to be
filled
by the deathbed, by the evil of it, the mattress like the altar of an abattoir religion.

Celine had been sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent and her foot on the mattress, painting her toenails. Listening to music
through the earphones of her iPod, she could not have heard the struggle in her grandmother’s room.

Before throwing open the door and attacking, Billy had stripped out of his clothes and tossed them on the hallway floor. Naked, knife in hand, hot with the thrill of having garroted his grandmother with a tightly twisted red silk scarf, he burst into his sister’s room and overwhelmed her. Pain, shock, and terror robbed her of the ability to resist effectively.

The mirror image of the bed filled John Calvino with revulsion, and he heard himself breathing through his open mouth to avoid the coppery smell of the blood-soaked mattress batting that had not yet dried and would not for a long time. But the humid air had a coppery taste—or he imagined it did—that offended worse than the smell, and he clenched his teeth, his nostrils flaring.

Holstering his pistol, he turned to face the abomination, which was immeasurably more terrible than the reflection of it. His disgust was twined now with anger and pity, three threads on a needle sewing this moment into his memory, not only the moment, the scene, but also the raw emotion of it.

Then he could hear Celine, the Celine of his quasi-clairvoyant imagination: crying out in pain and terror, weeping with the shame of violation, pleading for her life, beseeching God to save her, receiving no mercy from the beast who was her brother, receiving no grace until at last, at last, the final thrust of the knife put an end to her misery.