Her Every Fear

by Peter Swanson

  “What are you doing here, Henry?” Corbin asked, sounding like a stern teacher disciplining a student.

  Henry began to speak, to explain, when he realized that Corbin had a knife and was coming toward him. A surge of adrenalized joy went through Henry as he jumped back and avoided Corbin’s lunge. Then he leapt, riding Corbin’s body down to the wooden floor, pinning him and wrestling for the knife. He nearly had it when it sliced across the palm of his hand, and he instinctively jerked backward. Corbin came after him again, nearly stabbing him in the face, but the knife stuck in the floor, and Henry was able to get to it with his good hand, leaping onto Corbin, slicing with the knife at his throat, the skin parting the way skin does. So easily. Corbin fell to the floor. In the dim light the blood that came from his neck was an inky black.

  Henry stood, stumbling backward. His hand thrummed, and he looked at it. Blood was oozing its way down into his sleeve, and his thumb hung loose, the tendon severed. He quickly looked around the room for something to stanch the bleeding, then remembered the ski mask in his pocket. He set the knife down, pulled the hat out with his good hand, and crouched down to dress his hand. He gingerly slid his dangling thumb through an opening in the slick material, then wrapped his hand, tucking the excess material so that it held. It would have to do for now. Corbin was still making sounds, soft, bubbling gurgles, and Henry turned his attention to him.

  They were no longer alone. Kate had entered the living room and was now crouched over Corbin’s crumpled body. She hadn’t noticed Henry. He took the knife from the floor and stood. He watched for a moment, the world slowing down into this one frozen tableau. Corbin dying, and an angel in white already at his side.

  Then Corbin’s gaze shifted, and for a brief moment, his eyes made contact with Henry’s, the two of them looking directly at one another after so many years. Corbin was gesturing with his blood-slicked hand, moving a finger, and trying to say something to Kate. It caused her to turn, and that was when Henry leapt, landing on her back. He heard the air leave her lungs, her head thunk as it hit the floor. He pushed the knife into her back, encountering a shoulder blade, pulled it out again, and stuck the entire blade into the softness high up next to her spine. Henry rolled off her and into a sitting position. Corbin’s hand still clutched at his throat. Henry moved closer, looked at his eyes, open but unfocused now, blood bubbling from his mouth.

  There was a loud knock at the door, followed by a woman’s voice: “POLICE. OPEN UP.”

  Henry, in the seconds he had, began to calculate. Should he run for the basement? Then he watched, in amazement, as Kate, knife still protruding, stood up and wobbled toward the front door, opening it up as though a cocktail party guest had arrived. Henry pulled his small pocketknife from his jacket pocket, flicked out the blade, then took Corbin by the shoulders and yanked him toward him to act as a shield. The policewoman entered, gun drawn. Henry watched her eyes scan the scene, from Kate to Corbin and then to Henry, who was now dragging Corbin’s body back onto his, holding the pocketknife to Corbin’s damaged neck, the smell of blood thick in the air.

  She took a step into the room, gun pointed at Henry. “Let him go, and let me see your hands.” She took her left hand off her gun and fumbled for the radio at her belt.

  Henry paused, holding on to the knife. He was grateful, in a way, that it had come to this.

  Chapter 36

  Detective Roberta James took careful aim, exhaled, and fired her Glock at a living target for the first time in her life. The .40-caliber bullet hit the smiling man in the upper lip, and his smiled collapsed inward as he fell backward and hit the floor. The knife that he’d been pushing into the neck of the bleeding man clattered to the floor.

  While radioing in for immediate backup, she dropped to a knee and took a look at the man with the neck wound. The blood was coming fast, although it wasn’t spurting. She turned to Kate and calmly asked for clean towels.

  “Is he dead?” Kate asked. Her voice sounded too casual, as though she wasn’t comprehending what was happening.

  “I don’t know. I need to get some towels and stop this bleeding.” She stood, and that was when she noticed the handle of the knife that was jutting at a ninety-degree angle from the top of Kate’s back, just behind a shoulder. “I’ll get them, Kate. You just stay there. Where are they?”

  “There’s a bathroom right down there,” Kate said. She swiveled, made a funny expression, and asked: “Is there something on my back?” She reached back with a hand and Detective James stopped her, gripping her forearms and bringing them down to her side. Kate’s eyes were bright. The detective knew she was in shock. “I need you to have a seat, right here, and not touch your back. The ambulance is on the way.”

  She left Kate where she was and moved as fast as she could, located a bathroom, and pulled a towel from a rack. Returning, she was relieved to see that Kate had stayed where she was, her hands primly on her knees. “It’s Corbin,” she said to the passing detective.

  “Who is?” Detective James asked while pressing the towel against the blood flow from the neck.

  “He is. That’s my cousin, Corbin Dell. He was trying to save me.” Her voice was far too calm, the voice of someone speaking in their sleep.

  James held the towel in place as it turned dark and damp from the blood. At least the knife hadn’t severed the carotid artery, or he’d be dead already. Still, he had lost a lot of blood. She looked at his face; it did look like the pictures she’d seen of Corbin. His eyes were glassy, and she said, “Corbin, hang in there.”

  She thought she saw some comprehension in his eyes.

  “Is he dead?” Kate asked.

  “No, he’s still alive. The ambulance will be here any moment. Tell me what happened.”

  “Corbin woke me up and made me hide in a closet. He was trying to save me. I should have stayed in the closet.”

  James heard a distant siren and silently prayed that it was the ambulance coming for them. She pressed two fingers underneath Corbin’s chin. If there was a pulse, it was very, very faint.

  “You saved her, Corbin,” she said, in case he was listening.

  “Hi, Sanders,” Kate was saying, and James spun her head. A white cat went up to Kate and rubbed against her leg. Kate stroked its back, leaving a streak of blood on its pristine white fur. The siren got louder.

  Six hours earlier, Detective James had entered her condo in Watertown, a little bit relieved that the FBI was officially taking over the Audrey Marshall homicide. She calculated that she’d slept a total of maybe twelve hours since the body had been discovered on Saturday. It was now Tuesday evening. She poured herself a Famous Grouse on the rocks and changed into the tank top she liked to sleep in and the Celtics pajama shorts she’d gotten for Christmas from her parents. She liked them, not so much because they were emblazoned with the Celtics logo, but because they were comfortable, and even in the coldest stretch of a Boston winter, she hated to sleep in full-length pajama bottoms. She lay down on her sofa and held the lowball glass on her stomach. The pajama bottoms weren’t the only Celtics-related item she’d received this past Christmas. She’d gotten a mug, as well, from her niece who always got her a gift, and a pink long-sleeved T-shirt from her sister with the Celtics logo on it. It was clear what she was becoming—that relative who was only associated with one thing. She’s a Celtics fan, so get her something Celtics if you can’t think of anything else. She was like that old uncle who liked golf, so all he got was golf stuff. And the message from her sister was also very clear; the fitted pink shirt was suggesting that it wasn’t too late to snag a man.

  She sat up a little and took a sip of her scotch. Why was she thinking about this stuff? Because I’m exhausted, she told herself.

  She closed her eyes. The image of Audrey Marshall on the kitchen floor, butchered like a piece of meat, swam immediately into her mind, as it had been doing, regularly and without mercy, for the past three days. She sat up on the sofa, had another sip of her drink, and stretche
d her back out, listening with satisfaction to the small popping sounds coming from her spine.

  Her cell phone rang, and she knew instinctively that it was her captain before she even saw his name on the screen.

  “Thought you’d like to know that we got an anonymous call right after you left. It came from a pay phone in the South End, from a man who claimed to be one of Audrey Marshall’s friends, but he wouldn’t give us a name. He said that Alan Cherney is the killer, and that Alan has a bloody knife in his possession.”

  “Jesus. How did he know that?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Probably knew because he planted it on him.”

  Mark laughed, and as usual, laughing made him cough. “Thought you’d like to know, even though I know you were going home to get some sleep.”

  “Strike that off the agenda. Tan’s been told?” Abigail Tan was the FBI agent now assigned as lead in the case.

  “Yes. She’s off to get a search warrant.”

  “What did she think?” James asked.

  “She didn’t tell me, but she wanted me to tell you. What do you think?”

  “It’s our Jack, I’m sure of it. He’s setting up Alan Cherney, I guess. I don’t know why, exactly.”

  “Probably what Tan thinks, too.”

  “But let’s execute the warrant, and if we find a knife, arrest Cherney. We can find out more about Jack, at least, and get something, anything—”

  “Oh, gotta run, Roberta. I’ll call you right back.”

  He’d rung off. James took a sip of her scotch but it was gone, and the ice tapped against her teeth. She paced the room, thinking.

  Jack was getting bold, which meant he was probably about to screw up. Or that’s what she was hoping for, anyway. He was now their principal suspect, despite the fact that Corbin Dell had gone missing from his borrowed apartment in London. Corbin was involved somehow, but James did not believe he had killed Audrey Marshall. The timeline made it a very remote possibility. She believed the killer was the man who was calling himself Jack Ludovico, and she believed that he’d killed at least two women before, one on the North Shore of Massachusetts named Rachael Chess, and one in Connecticut named Linda Alcheri nearly fourteen years earlier. Both women, like Audrey Marshall, had been cut down the middle after they’d been killed. Rachael Chess had been found on a beach in New Essex, not far from where Corbin Dell’s mother had a house. James had studied the file, and Corbin’s name had come up as someone who knew the deceased, but he’d been eliminated from the inquiry since he’d been out of the country when the murder had been committed. There was no connection that James could find between Linda Alcheri, the dead girl from Connecticut, and Corbin Dell. She’d been found dead at an old Boy Scout camp outside of the city. Cause of death had been a blow to the head from a rock, but before she’d been buried she’d been cut down the face, and her clothes and some of the skin on her torso was cut away. Why had no one made a connection with the second murder in New Essex? Cause of death had been different, but the postmortem wounds were the same, or at least they were extremely similar. Now that there’d been a third murder—another woman with the exact same wounds—the FBI had arrived. James heard that some of the police were now calling the murderer the Failed Magician. He tries to cut his women in half.

  Abigail Tan, despite her age (she didn’t look much older than twenty-five), seemed competent. Earlier that day, James told her what she’d found in the Alcheri files. “Two of Linda’s friends mentioned in interviews that Linda had briefly been seeing someone named Hank. They both remembered a first name, but not a second. They never found this Hank.”

  “And you think this Hank is . . . ?”

  “I think the person who called himself Hank back then might be calling himself Jack Ludovico now.”

  “What makes you think he’s not just who he says he is, a friend trying to get some answers?”

  “Then why didn’t he come to us? And why doesn’t Audrey Marshall mention him in her diary?” What James didn’t say was that she just somehow knew. Both murders involved a shadowy figure who never came forward, and she knew that that person, probably not named Hank or Jack, was the same person.

  “Okay, then, if he’s the killer, then why is he hanging around? Why did he go and talk with Kate Priddy?”

  “I think he’s trying to pin this murder on Corbin Dell. Audrey Marshall’s arm was bent back over her head, pointing toward Dell’s apartment. The coroner said her arm was placed in that position after death. He wants us to think it’s Corbin, so that’s why he’s hanging around. Maybe killing Rachael Chess was his first attempt at framing him, and it didn’t work.”

  “Should we publish the sketch that Kate Priddy did?”

  James had thought of that. “Not yet. I don’t think he lives locally, and if the sketch shows up on the front page, he’ll leave town. He’s being reckless right now, returning to the scene of the crime to talk with a neighbor. Let’s wait him out and see if he pops up again.”

  And now he had, trying to frame Alan Cherney for some inexplicable reason.

  James picked her phone back up to call the captain, but before she could call him, the phone was vibrating in her hand. Abigail.

  “Did you get a warrant?” James asked.

  “Not yet, but I talked with Dietrichson. He agreed to stay late.”

  “Want company?”

  “That’s why I’m calling.”

  They met at the courthouse, and got Judge Albert Dietrichson’s fairly reluctant signature on the search warrant for Alan Cherney’s apartment at 101 Bury Street. James had to convince him that the anonymous call that had been recorded that afternoon was not the sole reason for the search warrant.

  “Did you get a statement from Alan Cherney after the body was discovered?” the judge asked, as he was packing his briefcase to go home for the day.

  “We did. I didn’t take it, myself, but Officer Karen Gibson did. She said he reported that he didn’t personally know Audrey Marshall, but that he knew her from sight. She reported that he was acting strange.”

  The judge raised one eyebrow and looked at James. “Did she specify what she meant by strange?”

  “She reported that he seemed visibly shaken by the death in his apartment building. She didn’t know whether it was because of the proximity of the crime, or because he knew the victim more intimately than he was indicating. And one more thing, Kate Priddy, the cousin who is currently occupying Corbin Dell’s apartment, has gotten to know Alan Cherney, and she indicated to us that he used to watch Audrey Marshall through her window.”

  “From where? The street?”

  “No. From his own apartment. Their windows face one another above the courtyard of the building. It’s shaped like a U.”

  “Got it,” the judge said. His expression didn’t change as he signed the warrant.

  An hour later, James met up with Abigail Tan at 101 Bury Street, and together, along with Mike Gaetano and Andre Damour from the department, entered Alan Cherney’s apartment and served the warrant. He had been sleeping, and he was extremely drunk, blurry eyed and slurring his speech. He’d gone to his bathroom to be sick; they’d located the leather courier bag that the anonymous caller had identified, and found and bagged the knife. Abigail made the arrest.

  Back at the station, James got Alan, who had declined the offer of legal representation, a cup of coffee and brought him to an interrogation room. He was alternating between docility and panic. “I didn’t kill Audrey Marshall,” he said, as she walked him into the room. “You know that, right?”

  “Agent Tan’s going to be questioning you in just a few minutes, and you can tell everything to her.”

  Before leaving the room, leaving Alan alone to stew for a few minutes, he blurted out, almost near tears, “It wasn’t hives.” It was something he’d said earlier, when she’d first cuffed him.

  James paused. She knew she should leave him alone, let him answer questions once the official interrogation bega
n, but she turned back toward him anyway. “You need to go and check on Kate Priddy,” he said. “He said he had hives on his arm, but it wasn’t. It was Sanders who scratched him, but Sanders only scratches anyone when he’s in the basement. He’s a different Sanders down there, and that’s where Jack got scratched. He’s coming and going through the basement. I think he’s after Kate. I have a bad feeling. It’s a really bad feeling.”

  “Sanders?” James asked.

  “He’s the cat that’s always around. He’s friendly, but if you try and pet him when he’s in the basement, he scratches you. Jack is coming through the basement. That’s how he’s getting in.”

  James said, “Someone’ll be right here, Alan, okay?”

  An hour later, James watched the beginning of the interrogation, watched as Alan, who seemed to be sobering up, said the exact same thing about the cat to Abigail Tan. Hearing the words again made James’s scalp tingle.

  She left the station and drove back to 101 Bury Street. She sat in her car for a moment, staring up at the blank windows of the apartment building. It wouldn’t hurt to just check on the apartment. She’d knock gently on the door. She’d listen, and if she heard nothing, then she’d return to her own apartment.

  “Hey there, Sanibel,” she said to the doorman, no longer needing to show him her badge. “Just checking in on Kate Priddy in 3D. She’s expecting me.”

  She’d only just reached the door when she heard scuffling sounds from inside, then what sounded like a bag of sand being dropped onto a concrete floor. She unholstered her gun and banged on the door. She should have gotten backup, but it was too late now.

  Chapter 37

  The man Detective Roberta James had shot in the face was pronounced dead at the scene by the EMTs.

  Kate Priddy was taken by ambulance to Mass General Hospital, where on-call surgeons removed the five-inch knife that was buried high up in her back. Somehow, the blade had missed her spinal cord, plus all major arteries. There was bone damage, and she had a concussion, but the doctors and nurses who were present at the surgery would have a story to tell for many years about the girl who survived a knife wound that should have been fatal.