Shatter the Night

by Emily Littlejohn

  Gloom, and regret.

  “Are you making progress on finding my husband’s killer? It’s been over a week. Surely you’ve found something.”

  “Yes.” I told Edith what I could, watching as her face registered shock and horror as I recounted Josiah Black’s crimes. She gasped when I explained that Henry Montgomery had been the judge at Josiah Black’s trail. “You’re saying that’s why Caleb was killed? Because of something that crazy old man did?”

  “I take it you weren’t a fan.”

  Edith nodded emphatically. “Henry Montgomery was a punitive son of a bitch who made life hell for Caleb. Henry even went so far as to proposition me on my wedding night; he asked why I was content to be with the boy when I could have the man. Can you imagine? He was disgusting. I was thrilled when he dropped dead of a massive stroke. And though he’d never admit it, I know Caleb was happier after his father was gone.”

  From my purse, I pulled out the photograph that Gloria Dumont had given me, of a young Caleb and his father, Judge Henry Montgomery. Silently, I handed it to Edith and watched as her eyes filled with tears.

  She stroked Caleb’s face. “Where did you find this?”

  “Caleb gave it to Gloria Dumont when he retired. He wanted her to have it, said she should have it as a reminder to always keep the law on her side. He also mentioned something about wanting to atone for the sins of his father.” I paused, thinking about everything I’d read on the Josiah Black trial. “It’s not obvious that Black was guilty. Could Henry Montgomery have done something to ensure a conviction?”

  Edith set the photograph in her lap and wiped her eyes. After a moment, she nodded. “As I understand it, there was a lot of corruption back in those days. In many ways, Cedar Valley was the Wild, Wild West. From what I’ve read and heard, it was like that all over the country. You had these young, and older, men and some women who’d been away during the war. Then they returned, changed. Scarred by their time in the service, by the things they’d seen and had to do. It’s my belief that some people, even those too old to enlist, those who’d remained behind, like Henry Montgomery, were changed by the war. We’re all part of one big quilt, Gemma. A few loose threads here, a small tear there, we might not notice it. Not right away. But eventually, we all feel it.”

  I wasn’t totally following Edith. She’d finished the brandy by then and in her eyes, an amber glow seemed to burn. It was the haze of someone on the edge of tipsy.

  Then she perked back up. “Oh! Do you remember, you were asking about that torn photograph you found in Caleb’s hotel room?”

  I nodded, and she went to a nearby bookshelf and returned with an album. I flipped through it, once more taking in the images of the expensive Southern wedding. I paused a moment on a picture of the beaming bride and happy groom with their parents, noting Henry Montgomery’s predatory gaze at his son’s new bride.

  I moved on, finally coming to the last picture in the album. It was Edith, a young Tom Gearhart, and Caleb. Tom’s arm was draped around their shoulders, a heavy ring visible on his hand.

  Tom was the person who’d been ripped out of the photograph.

  Even more surprising was the fact that Tom, who could not have been older than twenty or twenty-one years in the picture, was in Marine Corps dress blues.

  “Tom served?”

  Edith nodded. “Oh yes. He was in the Middle East for a spell, then was injured in a roadside bombing. He was brokenhearted about it, but I suppose everything happens for a reason. He made his way to Hollywood after that and well, the rest is history.”

  I swallowed, aware of how quiet the house suddenly seemed. “Can you call him? Ask him to join us for a moment?”

  Edith looked surprised but nodded. “Of course.” She went to a sideboard, where a discreet house phone was set into the corner. She picked up the phone, murmured a few words into it, then hung up.

  She returned to me and poured herself another brandy. “Tom will be down in a moment.”

  I sat with my hands in my lap, my heart thudding. Had we been completely thrown off track by learning of Josiah Black? Was there something else going on here? Why hadn’t Finn and I questioned Edith and Tom after we’d learned of her run-in with Michael Esposito in Belle Vista?

  Moving silently, Tom appeared in the doorway. He slunk into the room and made his way to the brandy. His mood was surly, his only acknowledgment of me a brief nod. Gone was the showman, the bright actor. In his place was a hungover man who smelled of stale cigarette smoke.

  I walked the album over to him and flipped it open to the photograph in question. He stared down at it, then looked up at me. “Yeah?”

  “Were you Marine Corps?

  “First Battalion, Third Marines. I was stationed in Afghanistan,” Tom stammered. A faint blush bloomed across his throat. “I was discharged, honorably, of course, for an injury I sustained in the course of duty.”

  “What kind of work did you do over there?”

  “A little bit of this, a little of that. Look, why are you asking me about my time in the service? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Why haven’t you caught Caleb’s killer yet?”

  I decided to take a chance. “Tom, we’re looking for a killer with a military background. Possibly a man about your age. Someone who had access to Caleb; knew his habits, his routine. Someone who is comfortable with costumes, disguises.”

  A log in the fireplace fell and the three of us jumped. The flames leaped up and out, then resettled. Tom paled. “You can’t think … It’s impossible. I didn’t have anything to do with Caleb’s death.” He turned to Edith, who wore an equally shocked look on her face, the color high in her cheeks.

  She took a step toward us, her hands balled into fists.

  “What did you do?” she hissed and shot a glance toward the fireplace, where a set of brass pokers rested against the brick.

  “Edith, stop right there. Please don’t take another step.” I held an arm up, willing her to freeze. Then I turned back to Tom. His face was full of confusion. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at his older sister.

  “Edie, my God, how could you think I had anything to do with your husband’s murder? Look, I wasn’t in the Marine Corps, okay? They wouldn’t take me. I made the whole thing up. I moved to Charleston when I was nineteen and faked letters home. You could say it was the start of my acting career.” Tom seemed to veer between embarrassment and pride. “It was a rather clever and crafty scheme.”

  Edith swayed with disbelief. “Thomas. How could you? Your mother and our dad were so proud.”

  “And that’s exactly why I had to keep the lie going. You were the golden child. You could never do anything wrong. Do you know, the first time Dad ever said he was proud to call me his son was after I told him I enlisted.” Tom went to Edith, but she moved away and perched on the edge of an armchair, shakily pulling a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket.

  “How did you keep the lie going for so long?” she demanded. “I have letters from you, postmarked from the Middle East.”

  “Oh, that was easy. I had so many friends there. I’d send them packages that included sealed letters I asked them to send back for me. No one questioned it.” Tom shrugged. “After a while, the lie just became a part of who I was.”

  I was frustrated to once again find myself with a possible lead only to have it dashed to pieces. “So just to be clear, Tom, you don’t have any military experience?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No. Though I have played a number of soldiers on the big screen. I was the sergeant who appeared as a witness for the defense in The Glorious Fall … You may have seen it?”

  “No, I missed that one.”

  I left Edith and Tom still bickering in the library and let myself out.

  It was dark by then and I walked with the moonlight my only illumination. As I approached my car, I suddenly stopped. I was ten feet away. The driver’s side door was ajar, and a man sat in my seat, hunched over, doin
g something with, or under, the steering wheel. I saw by the dome light that he was a decent size and weight, solid, with a dark hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

  Slowly, silently, I withdrew my weapon from the harness on my hip. With the utmost care and stealth, I clicked the safety off and took a wide-legged stance, both hands painfully gripped around the gun; hands that were still healing, tender to the touch.

  I said a silent prayer as I exhaled that they were hands that still knew how to do the job, if it came to that.

  “Freeze! Put your hands on your head, now, now!” I shouted. Inside the car, the man flinched and then went very still. “Hands on your head, do it, right now!”

  Still the man refused to move. We were at an impasse. I could hardly shoot a man in the back simply for breaking into my car, and yet the longer he went without obeying my command, the closer we got to a dangerous point.

  I tried again, shouting louder. “This is the Cedar Valley Police Department. Move your ass, right now.”

  Slowly, the man lifted first his left hand and then his right. He placed them on the top of his head and backed out of the car.

  “Turn around.”

  The man turned and I gasped when I saw his face. Under the hood, he wore a latex mask of a stitched face. Sutures in neat X’s crossed his eyes, and his mouth was sewn shut by a dozen more. Around the sutures, bruises competed with dried blood.

  I swallowed, hard. “Take off the mask.”

  The man shook his head and I lowered the gun so that it pointed dead center on his chest. “Take off the goddamn mask. Slowly.”

  With a reluctant nod, he put his right hand on the left side of his face and began to tug the rubber from his skin. I loosened my grip and then, impossibly, an enormous brown bat flew down in front of me, close enough for me to feel the beat of its leathery wings against the cold night air. It shrieked and darted around my face. Startled, I stepped back with a cry and swung at the air with my hands, gun still firmly gripped in both.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the man bolt. By the time I’d stepped away from the bat and made it into the street, he was gone. I turned in a slow circle, gun raised again, my heart thudding a million miles in my chest, but it was no use.

  The street was empty and I was alone, a shaken cop standing under the light of a blinking streetlamp, furious at myself and at the man in the mask.

  Back at my car, I called Finn and a mechanic, Mac Neal, whom I trusted implicitly. They arrived at the same time and as I told Finn what had happened, Neal inspected every inch of my car. Finally, he stood and pronounced it hunky-dory.

  “If I had to guess, kiddo, I think you interrupted the creep just as he was getting started. Looks like he was going for the brake lines.” Mac stroked his long salt-and-pepper beard, his eyes heavy with worry. “Driving up the canyon, late at night like this, all it would take is a deer crossing the road and bam, you’d be up shit’s creek if you didn’t have your brakes.”

  “Thanks for the mental picture, Mac. What do I owe you?”

  He shook his head. “This one’s on the house. You’ve given me a lot of business over the years.”

  After he left, Finn and I spent a few minutes talking. Finn thought we should go after the man in the mask immediately.

  “How? I have no idea what direction he went, or what he looks like. Take off the hoodie and the mask and he could be anyone. I think we take this as a good sign, Finn. We’re on the right track with our investigation.” I slid into my car and sniffed. It smelled of Mac’s auto shop and heavy, male sweat. Quickly rolling down the window, I smiled up at Finn. “We’re on the right track.”

  He leaned down, rested his forearms on my windowsill. “A bat, huh?”

  “They’re hibernating somewhere close by. This one must have been sick, or maybe hungry. Maybe it just needed a breath of fresh air. You ever smelled guano? It’s horrific.” I turned the ignition and started the car. Nothing unusual happened and I exhaled shakily. “The thing was three feet across, at least. Probably a vampire bat.”

  “Uh-huh. Drive safe. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I drove away from Edith’s house and headed home under the light of a pale, rising moon. It moved slowly across the indigo sky, traveling as though it didn’t have a care in the world. What a life, I thought, to meander among the stars, crossing the universe one evening at a time. If there was a man in the moon, sitting up there since the dawn of time, the sheer number of things he’d seen in his existence was staggering.

  As I drove, my heart was heavy with anticipation and dread. Every few seconds, I checked the rearview mirror for the headlights of someone following me, but I had the roads to myself. I remembered a scary story my girlfriends and I used to tell every Halloween when we were young, about the woman driving home alone who looks in her rearview mirror and, to her horror, sees a man with an axe slowly rising from the backseat.

  I shivered, hoping I’d soon forget the mask the man in my own car had worn, with its crude stitches and bloody, battered eyes and mouth.

  Instead, I tried to focus on the fact that I didn’t know what the next day would bring, what fresh horror might find us. The worst part of all was the voice in my ear, constantly whispering to me, that the town itself had somehow summoned its own version of Ghost Boy back to life for one final act of terror.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Thursday.

  Time was up.

  The phrase ran on repeat in my mind, as I rose and showered. I made a bowl of oatmeal for Grace, too nerve-struck to eat myself. It felt as though every fiber in my being were clenched in anticipation.

  Time’s up.

  When I’d gotten home the night before, I’d woken Brody and told him everything I could about the investigation, ending with my run-in with Stitched Face at the Montgomery house. Brody was concerned, but we both knew I’d been in much worse situations. To be honest, other than worry, there wasn’t much either of us could do.

  I was a cop, through and through, and we knew what that meant; that there would be times, now and in the future, when I’d find myself face-to-face with truly bad people.

  When I pulled back the curtains in the kitchen windows, I saw it had snowed again. In fact, it was still snowing. The sky was white, and the whole world appeared bleary, tired. I poured a second cup of coffee and sipped it as I spooned oatmeal into Grace’s mouth. She babbled and cooed and laughed as Seamus waited anxiously at her feet for a dropped morsel. It was a magical moment of peace and domestic bliss, until Grace decided to upend the bowl of oatmeal onto Seamus’s head.

  The dog howled, the baby cried, and I felt like breaking into tears myself.

  But, by the time Brody woke and joined us, I’d gotten both dog and floor cleaned. Grace was content to crawl around with a couple of empty containers. As she played, Brody and I talked. The night before, we’d decided that he would take a few days off and stay home with Grace. I didn’t want him going into town, to work, and I wanted Grace at home, safe. We didn’t know where the killer would strike. What if he went for a commercial building, an office structure, instead of a tavern? Or the library or rec center?

  Clementine was happy to take a couple of days off as well. I told her to stay out of heavily populated buildings, and she made me feel crazy but I wouldn’t let her off the phone until she agreed.

  Then she wanted to know all the gory details, and I couldn’t end the call fast enough.

  As I drove through town, it was still early. Yellow light from front porch bulbs flickered weakly against the gently falling snow.

  At the station, I reviewed my notes and the murder board, willing something to jump out at me. I was frustrated and anxious, though, unable to concentrate. Finally, I went to Chief Chavez’s office. Inside, I was surprised to find Sheriff Rose Underhill stretched out on the chief’s couch, reading a copy of Josiah Black’s arrest record.

  Underhill lowered the report and stared at me. “You’ve got a real doozy on your hands.” Sighing, th
e sheriff sat up and fluffed her hair. “I hate this time of year. Every November, I think I’ll move to Miami or Los Angeles, but I never do. You know what keeps me here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sheer laziness. Sounds like a real bitch to pack up and move. Much easier to stay put and complain.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My old pal Angel Chavez sent up the Bat-Signal, so here I am, at your disposal. Though to be honest, this town has become a bit of a snooze, hasn’t it?”

  “Compared to Bishop?” I asked in surprise.

  Underhill let out a guffaw. “Good point. Listen, we’ve got reinforcements coming from all four corners of this state and then some. We’ll find your perp, this ‘Ghost Boy,’ make no bones about it.”

  The sheriff stood up and stretched and I saw that she wore a revolver on her belt, instead of the semiautomatic pistol favored by most law enforcement officers.

  She noticed me looking.

  “It’s an antique, a relic from another era. It belonged to my father. He was a marshal in Nebraska, a real mean son of a bitch. He died of emphysema twenty years ago, and on his deathbed, he asked for one thing: to be buried with his revolver.” Underhill pulled the gun from her belt, gave the cylinder a spin, and then slipped the gun back into the belt with a toothy grin and a slow wink. “Mama gave me the gun after his funeral. I expect the bastard is still rolling in his grave, looking for it.”

  Chief Chavez came in. “Ah, good, you’re here. I want to go over the plan for today. Everyone’s gathering in the conference room in ten minutes.”

  I took a deep breath. There was something that had been bothering me for days, since my visit to Dillahunt at the Belle Vista Penitentiary. I didn’t know when I would get an opportunity to have both Chief Chavez and Sheriff Underhill to myself again and I had to know.

  I had to be absolutely certain that Dillahunt, his letters, Colleen Holden … that none of it was related to my cases.