A Killer in the Wind Page 5

  “Let’s face it, we live among troglodytes most of the time,” Emory went on. “People are so incredibly backward, so incredibly insensitive to differences in points of view. I mean, God, this is the postmodern world already! There are cultures on the globe where we’d be perfectly accepted, cultures where we’d be priests and kings. What are they going to say now? ‘Only our way is right?’ By what argument? ‘Oh, I feel it. You’re evil. I feel it in my bones.’ It’s absurd. Socrates himself was . . . What’s the matter?”

  I had been staring past him at the fog gathered at the windows. It seemed to roil and push against the glass like a living animal, seeking access. Then all a once . . . a shadow on the fog . . . a small dark figure moving through it, toward me . . . reaching out for me plaintively with his desperate little hands . . .

  The ghost boy. Alexander.

  Emory looked over his shoulder to see what I was gaping at. But the dead boy sank back into the fog, and the fog sank away into the darkness.

  I glanced at my watch. Almost ten minutes had gone by since he’d pressed that flashlight button. Another five or so and the tacs would invade and we might well be left empty-handed. Emory would slip the net.

  I plunked my drink down on the coffee table. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I really am tense. I’d feel a lot better if we could . . . you know, convene and have a drink afterward maybe.”

  Emory sat and gazed at me a long moment, a bland, meditative gaze. With his legs crossed at the knee, he swung his foot back and forth as he considered. In my feverish brain I thought I could practically hear him calculating whether or not to trust me. For a moment, in a waking dream, a waking nightmare, I saw him reach under his blue blazer and draw out a .38, ready to shoot me dead. I caught my breath—but the moment passed, the hallucination passed. He was just sitting there, just gazing at me.

  Then he smiled. He leaned forward in his chair. Set his drink down next to mine.

  “Afterward, you won’t want to, you know. That’s the problem. You’ll scuttle away—you’ll see. But . . .” He slapped his knees resolutely and stood. “I understand your . . . anticipation.” He gestured toward the archway. “Shall we?”

  I followed him back out into the foyer, then up the stairs. It was a hard climb for me. My body felt distant, as if I were running it by remote control from somewhere far away within myself. When we reached the landing, there were several halls going in different directions. So it seemed to me anyway. The place seemed to me a maze, a mad maze that was a living reflection of the mad maze in the haze of my mind. Down we went now along a corridor of doors and dark wood paneling. Around a corner . . . down another corridor. Lights like candles flickered in sconces on the wall. The mist curled around the lamps. Their light faded and the shadows threatened to swarm and overcome me. The tendrils of mist threatened to wrap themselves around me like skeletal fingers.

  I didn’t want to look at my watch, but all the while I felt the time tick-tick-ticking away. Around another corner . . . down another hall . . . Any minute, I thought, any second, Monahan and the staties were going to break down that door and come pouring in here.

  Not yet, I thought. Not yet.

  We came at last to the end of a corridor. There was a small triangular table set in the corner there with a vase of flowers on top of it. Emory bent to move the table aside, lifting its legs carefully over the runner so as not to jar the thing and tip the vase over.

  “You’ll like this part,” he said to me with a sly smile. “Very gothic.”

  Then he straightened. He pressed his palm against the wall, then pressed it harder and made a curt upward motion. A section of the wall snapped open, swung out toward us. Very gothic. Right.

  Emory moved back a little and gestured for me to go in. I stepped across the threshold.

  There was a tremendous blast as the door downstairs exploded inward. A dozen voices filled the house, an army of men shouting:

  “Police!”

  The tac team had arrived.

  Emory reacted fast—much faster than I did. I was too feverish, too drugged, too foggy in my mind to move quickly. But Emory—the moment he heard the sounds below, he threw his shoulder into me. Unsteady on my feet, I stumbled, reaching for the edge of the open wall. I missed it. I fell to my knee in the inner chamber. I caught a glimpse of a room draped in red velvet . . . a four-poster bed . . . expensive stuffed animals against one wall . . . Very gothic.

  Emory darted down the hall out of sight, quick as black lightning. I staggered up to go after him, seizing hold of the open wall to propel myself forward.

  But before I could, I sensed a presence behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the girl.

  She was beautiful—a beautiful child—and forlorn, so frail and forlorn. She stood trembling in a purple nightshirt with a faded picture of a cartoon princess on it. Her wrists were tied around the bedpost.

  She was seven or eight years old. She had long brown hair and green eyes with a dusting of freckles on her pug nose. She wasn’t crying. She was frightened beyond tears, desperate beyond tears. But her expression—lost, helpless, hopeless, terrified—would have shattered the heart of a statue.

  I leapt to her, the rage flaring in my chest like a living flame.

  “I’m a policeman,” I told her, nearly choking on the words. “No one will hurt you. No one.”

  I worked at the ropes quickly, blinking back tears.

  “I want to go home,” she managed to say—and her voice broke and she gulped and started to sob.

  The ropes came loose. I swept her up into my arms. She weighed nothing; nothing at all.

  “Hold on to me,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  I carried her out the door. Through the crazy maze of corridors. I don’t know how I found my way. The corridors snaked and twisted endlessly. The floor was dipping and swaying beneath my feet like ocean waves. The darkness curled in mistlike tendrils off the walls, and mist like darkness swirled around me. My body seemed a dead and raglike thing. Only the flame of rage inside me propelled me forward. Only my arms had strength, clutching the child against my chest.

  I came around a corner and almost ran into the barrel of a submachine gun. A tac in black armor, helmeted, masked, loomed out of the mist of my mind, monstrous.

  “It’s Champion!” I shouted at him.

  But he’d already seen the little girl, already thrown his arms up, pointing the rifle skyward. He cried out a curse, his voice cracking.

  “Where’s the stairs?” I shouted—but I saw them, just a few yards away. I had made it through the maze.

  The little girl was sobbing and trembling now as I carried her down the sweeping curl of steps to the foyer below. I had to hew close to the wall because men in black armor were pouring up the stairs past us, holding their machine guns at the ready. I could hear the tac team shouting all around beneath me and above me as they searched each room of the massive mansion:

  “Clear!”

  “Clear!”

  “Clear!”

  Just as I reached the ground floor, Monahan stomped immensely into the foyer. He was coming out of one of the halls. He was waving a .45 semiautomatic in the air, shouting, “Check the grounds!”

  “Jimmy!” I called to him. I set the girl’s feet on the floor. “Help me! Take her!”

  Monahan looked down at the child. He blinked once. He holstered his weapon. He lowered his enormous body to one knee in front of her. He wrapped his gigantic arms around her and pulled her against his vest. I heard him murmur to her in a voice like a dove cooing, “You’re safe now, baby.”

  I left him there, staggered away from him, staggered through the mind-mist to the foyer table. Grabbed the keys that Emory had left there and staggered out the front door.

  A cold rain was dropping heavily from the sky now. It washed down my face as I stepped off the porch. It carried away my tears and momentarily cleared my head. All around me, in the black forest surrounding the house on every side, beams of light were slashing here and there through the dark and the rainfall as the tac team searched for Emory among the trees. Bursts of static and muttering voices joined the shouts still coming from inside the house. They could not find him.

  Nauseous, feverish, weak as I was, I was still able to jog along the path back to my car. I pressed the button on the key to unlock the door, yanked the door open, and stuck my head in. Inside, I popped the glove compartment. I drew out my Glock 19.

  When I stood up straight again, I swayed, dizzy and sick. I became aware of red and blue lights flashing—the first flashing lights I’d seen. An ambulance. It came quickly and quietly up the drive. I saw Monahan striding across the lawn to meet it, the child nearly lost in those massive arms.

  I had to force my legs to move so I did, I forced them. I marched back up the path to the mansion’s front door. I paused there, leaning in the doorway, steadying myself with my hand against the jamb. Then I swung inside again.

  The tac team had spread out through the house. I could see black armor and flashlights any way I looked. I could hear them shouting everywhere.

  They could not find him.

  I turned to the right, away from the living room archway, toward a smaller archway into a smaller den. I went through—across a prim, green sitting room—through the sickening and smothering mist that was gathered there, toward a closed door on the far wall. The room was dark and shadowy. As I went through it, I thought I caught a presence in the corner of my eye. I thought I saw a child, enthroned in an armchair, watching me pass, expressionless. The dead boy. I didn’t turn to look. I didn’t dare. I stumbled across the room to the far door, through the door, and into a narrow corridor beyond.

  A flashlight beam hit me in the eyes as the officer searching the hall swung
his gun my way. The beam lanced painfully into the core of my head, the mist exploding away from me, then swarming back around me even thicker and more nauseating than before. The cop nodded at me as we passed in the hall.

  “Clear,” he said.

  I was too woozy and confused to nod back or answer. I just kept stumbling forward. I charged down the narrow hall past more pictures of ruins or maybe the same picture again and again, I didn’t know, couldn’t tell. I came to a door at the end of the hall, yet another door in this puzzle box of a house. I pulled it open. A walk-in linen closet. I stepped inside. Turned the light on. Pulled the door shut behind me.

  I was in a close little pantry. There were shelves on two of its walls. The third wall was empty. Nothing but wood paneling.

  I had seen that light outside, that glow on the grass as I was driving up to the house. I had seen the glow go out as I approached. There was no place that light could have come from. There was no window there, not even a cellar door. I remembered that. It had been in the back of my mind from the moment Emory had opened the secret bedroom upstairs.

  That light had come from somewhere near here.

  I reached out to the wood paneling in the linen closet. I pressed my hand against it. Then I pressed my hand against it harder—much harder—and felt it give very slightly. I made the same curt upward motion I had seen Emory make—and yes, a section of the wall snapped away and swung toward me. Very gothic.

  There was a stairway within, leading downward, becoming invisible in deep darkness. I went down. The open section of wall swung shut behind me. The dark closed in on me. It pressed tight. It seemed to seep into me and meld with the darkness already inside me. It was impossible to tell where the dark ended and I began. I went down and down.

  I reached the bottom. I nearly collided with the wall before I saw it. Then I did see it, and I saw a thin, thin line of dim white light hanging in the air just above my head. I pressed my hand against the paneling, pressed harder, lifted—and again, the wall opened. Light—dazzling brightness—spilled out over me. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I stepped into it.

  From this point on, my memories of that night are more like dreams. Glimpses and fragments that waver and fade. The light, that bright white light, and the smoke and the smell, so thick, so sharp; and the fog in my brain—it all came together and overwhelmed me.

  I staggered forward. I saw the source of the light: four white circular objects packed with halogen bulbs. I could not think what they were at the time but now, looking back, I know they were lights from an operating room. Their brilliant beams reflected, gleaming, off the steel operating table beneath them. They flashed off the loathsome instruments that were laid out in readiness on a stand beside the table and hanging from hooks on the white walls.

  The smell—the smell was disinfectant. A smell so harsh and raw I could almost see it in the air like heat. Emory had a red plastic gallon container of the stuff. He was splashing it wildly over the walls and the floor.

  The smoke, meanwhile, was billowing out of a metal trash can just near him. Papers and photographs were burning there. Through the fog and fever and stench and smoke, I caught a glimpse of one of the pictures, one of the photographs. I saw what it was before it curled and blackened. I thought, My God, my Jesus God.

  Emory spotted me then. He started back, throwing his hands out, flinging away the red plastic container. It slid across the tiled floor and rattled to rest. The green disinfectant came gulping out of the open neck so that the smell grew even worse, grew overpowering.

  Emory’s weak, round features were wild with terror. His green eyes lanced laserlike at me out of their folds of flesh, burning with terror and with rage.

  “Traitor!” he shrieked.

  I pointed my gun at him. “Who’s the Fat Woman?” I said.

  “Traitor!”

  “Where is she?”

  My voice sounded bizarre in my own ears, drawn out and distorted like a recording played back at slow speed. I was drowning in the feverish atmosphere down here. I was losing myself in it, falling away from myself, farther and farther away.

  “You think you’re Justice?” Emory screamed—at least that’s what I think he screamed, that’s what I remember. He started to cry. “You’re a traitor to everything!”

  But his voice was growing distorted too. He was slipping off into the atmosphere, slipping away from me. Both of us were lost and swirling in the swirling and unreal confusion that crossed and erased the borderlines between me and the world I saw.

  The rest is all like that, all darkness and unreal confusion, all mist and smoke and bright white gleaming lights and the choking stench, all of it filling me up with darkness—filling up all reality with darkness, so that reality and I became one dark thing, darkness itself, darkness alone.

  I think Emory went on screaming in that darkness. I’m not sure. I don’t remember.

  I don’t even remember killing him.

  3

  War Stories

  THERE WAS A restaurant called Salvatore’s on Main Street in Tyler. Nothing fancy: pizza and burgers and sandwiches, that sort of thing, plus a full bar. A lot of county office workers went there at the end of the day. A lot of families and some high school kids sometimes—the good kids, the clean kids. It was the sort of place you went for dinner and a good time and no trouble. And there never was any trouble, because it was where the county’s law enforcement officers hung out too—Sheriff’s Department deputies and BCI inspectors and state police and prosecutors and assistants and all.

  Salvatore cultivated our trade. He named drinks and sandwiches after us, especially the inspectors. Mine was a veal and onion submarine he called the Champion Hero, a name that always got a lot of laughs. Plus he put in one of those old Bally pinball machines especially for us. It was called “Police Force,” and was all about these lion and tiger cops chasing down weasel and reptile bad guys. Everyone had a good time with that as well.

  The day after Deputy Dunn and I tracked down Frank Bagot at his sister’s house was a Thursday. Salvatore’s was crowded as the workday closed. The story about Bagot had been in the local daily, the Tyler Dispatch: “Sheriff’s Men Track Down Tenn Murder Suspect.” The story took up most of the front page. Sheriff Brady had given the official statement, but Dunn and I had both been interviewed. Dunn was interviewed on the local radio station too. There was even a brief report about the arrest on the TV news out of Danbury across the state line.

  So when I laid off work and walked into Salvatore’s that evening, the crowd there erupted in a big cheer. A lot of them stood up and everyone started applauding. I couldn’t help grinning as I made my way through a gauntlet of handshakes to the big round table by the storefront window that Salvatore reserved for police.

  Young Dunn was already there, having a beer. So was another young deputy, Rob Wilder. Grassi and Sternhagen, both BCI, were present and accounted for, with a red wine and a scotch respectively. And Anne Brady, who was the sheriff’s daughter and a part-time administrative assistant in the department, was there with a beer as well. Anne was hoping to be a deputy when she finished college and she liked to be thought of as one of the boys. We tended to oblige her.

  “Well, I ordered a Champion Hero and here it is,” said Sternhagen.

  “Well, don’t hold back then, go on and bite me,” I said.

  “That’s the plan.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat with them. “And you must be that Deputy Dunn I keep hearing so much about on the radio.”

  Dunn blushed from his crew cut to his Adam’s apple. “That’s me.”

  “Tell us again how you pumped that mad dog full of lead, cowboy,” Grassi teased him.

  The whole table laughed and Dunn blushed even redder, hanging his head so low he nearly went face-first into his beer.

  Grassi slapped him on the back. He was a dark little man, broad at the shoulder, bright white teeth when he smiled but always kind of sinister in the eyes, if you asked me. He had a penchant for checkered sports coats no one could talk him out of. We’d had a run-in once after I answered a call for a domestic dispute at his house. He’d given his wife a black eye and I told him right in front of her I’d run him in if he did it again, member of service or not. Wouldn’t have done much good, of course. Sheriff Brady was expert at losing paperwork like that when he had a mind to. But Grassi felt I’d humiliated him in front of his wife and he took it hard. We’d made it up since—we had to, working together as we did—but it was a brittle relationship at best.