He guided the old station wagon down the Loms’ street, past snow-capped houses trimmed with strings of varicolored lights, then pulled into the curb before number 735. The house was a two-story colonial dark stone with a big front porch and a garage on the side. The locals called it Menelaus Manor. It had an unsavory history, but what did a house’s history matter? People‘s histories mattered.
The place lay dark before him. No Christmas trim, no lighted windows. As he hurried up the walk to the front door, he noticed how the perfect the layer of snow was unmarred by a single footprint.
He stepped up on the front porch and pressed the doorbell button. He didn’t hear any chime within so he used the brass knocker. Its sound echoed through the silent night. He rapped it again. Twice. Three times.
No answer.
He turned and stared back at the yard. One set of footprints, no tire tracks from the garage. They had to be home.
He saw a woman walking her dog down the quiet street. She stopped and turned his way. Both she and the dog seemed to be staring at him. It gave him the creeps, but not as much as this dark house.
He stepped back off the front porch and looked up at the second story. The house remained silent and unlit.
Bill was worried now. Really worried.
What the hell was going on?
He tried the front doorknob and it turned. The door swung inward. He called out a few hellos but no one answered, so he stepped inside, still calling out.
Standing in the dark foyer, lit only by the glow from the street lamp outside, Bill realized it was as cold inside as out. And the house felt … empty.
A terrible, inescapable sense of dread crept over him.
My God, where are they? What’s happened here?
And then he realized he was not alone. He almost cried out when he glanced to his right and spotted the faintly limned figure sitting in a chair by the living room window.
“Hello?” Bill said, his hand searching for the light switch. “Herb?”
He found the switch and flipped it. Yes … Herb. Sitting square in a straight-backed chair, staring into the air.
“Herb? Are you all right? Where’s Danny? Where’s Sara?”
At the mention of her name, Herb’s head turned to look at Bill but his eyes never seemed to settle on him, never seemed to focus. After a few seconds, he returned to staring into the air.
Bill approached him cautiously. A deep part of him knew something awful had happened here—or possibly was happening still—and screamed to turn and run. But he couldn’t run. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave this place without Danny.
Danny’s voice echoed in his head. He’s gonna kill me!
“Herb, tell me where Danny is. Tell me now, Herb. And tell me you haven’t done anything to him. Tell me, Herb.”
But Herb Lom only stared upward and outward at a corner of the ceiling.
Upstairs … he was staring upstairs. Did that mean anything?
Turning on lights as he moved, flipping every switch he passed, Bill found the staircase and headed for the second floor. Dread clawed at his throat as he called out the only names he could think of.
“Danny? Sara? Danny? Anyone here?”
Again Danny’s voice through the phone. Sara’s gone! There ain’t no Sara!
The only reply was the creaking of the stair treads under his feet and the faint howl from the uncradled telephone receiver on the table in the upper hall.
He stopped and called out again, and this time he heard a reply—a hoarse whisper from the doorway at the top of the stairs. Unintelligible, but definitely a voice. He ran toward the dark rectangle, lunged through it, fumbled along the wall with his hand, found the switch …
… light … a big bedroom … the master bedroom … red … all red … the rug, the walls, the ceiling, the bedspread … didn’t remember it being so red … Danny there … by the wall … naked … his head lolling … so white, so white … on the wall … arms spread … nails … in his palms … in his feet … face so white … and his insides … hanging out …
Bill felt the room lurch as his legs went flaccid under him. His knees slammed on the floor but he barely noticed the pain as he fell forward onto his hands and gripped the sticky red rug, retching.
No! This can’t be!
“Father Bill?”
Bill’s head snapped up. That voice … barely audible …
Danny’s eyes were open, staring at him; his lips were moving, his voice was raw skin dragging through broken glass.
“Father, it hurts.”
Bill forced his legs to work, to propel him across the red room. So much blood. How could one little boy hold so much blood? How could he lose it all and still be alive?
Bill averted his eyes. How could he be so cut up? Who would—?
He’s gonna kill me!
Herb. It must have been Herb. Sitting downstairs in some sort of post-epileptic funk while up here … up here …
And where was Sara?
Sara’s gone! There ain’t no Sara!
The nails. He couldn’t think about Sara now. He had to get the nails out of Danny’s hands and feet. He looked around for some way to remove them but all he saw was a bloody hammer. Bill fixed his eyes on the boy’s bloodless face, his tortured, pleading eyes.
“I’ll get you free, Danny. You just wait here and—” God, what am I saying? “I—I’ll be right back.”
“Father, it hurts so bad!”
Danny began screaming, hoarse, raw-throated wails that chased after Bill, tugging at the very underpinnings of his sanity as he raced downstairs. He pounded into the living room and hauled Herb from his chair. He wanted to tear him in half and he wanted to do it slowly, but that would take time, and he didn’t think Danny had much of that left.
“Tools, fucker! Where are your tools?”
Herb’s unfocused eyes stared past Bill’s shoulder. Bill shoved him back into the chair which flipped backward with Herb in it. He landed in a twisted sprawl on the floor and stayed there.
Bill ransacked the kitchen, found the door to the cellar, and ran down the steps, fearing all the while that somewhere along the way he’d trip over Sara’s remains. He was sure she was dead. He found a toolbox sitting on a dusty workbench. He grabbed it and raced back up to the second floor.
Danny was still screaming. Bill took the biggest set of pliers he could find and began working on the nails, removing the ones from the feet first, then moving up to the hands. As his ghastly white little body slumped to the floor, Danny’s eyes closed and he stopped his hoarse, breathy, barely audible screams. Bill thought he was dead but he couldn’t stop now. He pulled the spread from the double bed and wrapped the boy in it. Then he headed for the street, carrying Danny in his arms, racking his brain for the whereabouts of the nearest hospital.
Halfway to the car Danny opened his eyes and looked up at him and asked a question that shredded Bill’s heart.
“Why didn’t you come, Father Bill?” he said in a voice that was almost gone. “You said you’d come if I called. Why didn’t you come?”
4
The next few hours were a blur, a montage of white streets seen through a fogged windshield, of battling skidding tires, and locking wheels, of bouncing off curbs and near misses with other cars, all to the accompaniment of Danny’s nearly voiceless screaming … arriving at the hospital, one of the emergency room nurses fainting when Bill unfolded the bedspread to reveal Danny’s mutilated body, the ER doctor’s blanching face as he said there was no way his little hospital could give this boy the care he needed … the wild ride in the rear of the ambulance, racing into Brooklyn with lights flashing and sirens howling, skidding to a stop before Downstate Medical Center, the police waiting for them there … all their grim-faced questions as soon as Danny was wheeled away to surgery.
And then came the whippet-thin, chain-smoking detective with yellow stains between his right index and middle fingers, thinning brown hair, intense blue eyes, intense expression,
intense posture, everything about him aggressively intense.
5
Renny had got a look at the kid in the ER.
Twenty-plus years on the force and he’d never seen anything even remotely like what had been done to that kid. Turned his stomach upside down and inside out.
And now his chief was on the phone telling him he could pack it in until the day after tomorrow.
“I’m gonna stick with this one, Lieu.”
“Hey, Renny, it’s Christmas Eve,” Lieutenant McCauley said. “Unlax a little. Goldberg’s taking eleven to seven and what the hell is Christmas to Goldberg? Leave it to him.”
No way.
“Tell Goldberg to cover everything else on eleven-to-seven. This one’s mine.”
“Something special about this one, Renny? Something I should know?”
Renny tightened inside. Couldn’t let McCauley know there was anything personal here. Just play the cool, calm professional.
“Uh-uh. Just a child abuse case. A bad one. I think I got all the loose ends within reach. Just want to tie them up good before I call it a night.”
“That could take a while. How’s Joanne gonna handle that?”
“She’ll understand.” Joanne always understood.
“Okay. You change your mind and want to pack it in early, let Goldberg know.”
“Right, Lieu. Thanks. And Merry Christmas.”
“Same to you, Renny.”
Detective Sergeant Augustino hung up and headed for the doctor’s lounge he had commandeered. That was where they were holding the guy who’d brought the kid in. He said his name was Ryan, claimed he was a priest but had no ID and the sweatsuit he was wearing didn’t have a Roman collar.
Renny thought about the kid. Hard to think about much else. They didn’t know anything about him except what the so-called priest had told him: His name was Danny Gordon, he was seven years old, and until this afternoon he’d been a resident of St. Francis Home for Boys.
St. Francis … that had grabbed Renny. The kid was an orphan from St. F.’s and someone had cut him up bad.
That was all Renny had to hear to make this case real personal.
He’d left a uniform named Kolarcik on guard outside the lounge. Kolarcik was on the walkie-talkie as Renny approached in the hallway.
“They picked up the guy in the house,” Kolarcik said, thrusting the handset toward Renny. “Everything there’s pretty much like Father Ryan described it.”
We don’t know for sure he’s a priest yet, Renny wanted to say but skipped it.
“You mean the guy was just sitting there waiting to be picked up?”
“They say he looks like he’s in some sort of trance or something. They’re gonna take him down to the precinct house and—”
“Bring him here,” Renny said. “Tell those guys to bring him here and nowhere else. I want to get a full medical on this guy while he’s fresh … just to make sure he’s not suffering from any unapparent injuries.”
Kolarcik smiled. “Right.”
Renny was glad to see that this particular uniform was on his wavelength. No way that fucker in Queens was going to take a walk on a psycho plea, not if Renny had anything to say about it.
He opened the door to the lounge and took a look at the guy who said he was a priest. Big, clean cut, square jaw, thick brown hair, wide shoulders. Good-looking guy, but at the moment he looked crushed by fatigue and pretty well frayed on all his edges. He sat hunched forward on the sagging sofa, a cup of Downstate’s bitter, overheated coffee clasped in his hands. His fingers trembled as he rubbed his palms against the cup, as if trying to draw warmth from the steaming liquid on the other side of the Styrofoam. Fat chance.
“You connected with St. Francis?” Renny said.
The guy jumped, like his thoughts had been a thousand miles away. He glanced at Renny, then away.
“For the tenth time, yes.”
Renny took a chair opposite him and lit up a cigarette.
“What order you from?”
“The Society of Jesus.”
“I thought the Jesuits ran St. Francis.”
“Same thing.”
Renny smiled. “I knew that.”
The guy didn’t smile back. “Any word on Danny?”
“Still in surgery. Ever hear of Father Ed? Used to be at St. Francis.”
“Ed Dougherty? I met him once. At St. F.’s Centennial. He’s gone now.”
The guy had said the magic words: St. F.’s. Only someone who’d lived there called it St. F.’s.
Okay. So probably he really was Father William Ryan, S.J., but that didn’t absolutely mean that he had nothing to do with what had happened to that kid. Lots of bent priests around.
“Look, Detective Angostino, can we make small talk later?”
“It’s Augustino, and there’s no small talk and no later in something like this.”
“I’ve told you, it was Herb. The husband. Herbert Lom. He’s the one. You should be out—”
“We’ve got him. We’re bringing him down here for a check-up.”
“Here?” Ryan’s fatigue seemed to drop away from him in an instant. His eyes came to blazing life. “Here? Give me a few minutes alone with him in this little room. Just five minutes. Two.” The Styrofoam cup suddenly collapsed in his hand, spilling hot coffee all over him. He barely seemed to notice. “Just one lousy minute!”
Okay. So the priest was either a great actor or had nothing to do with hurting the kid.
“I want you to tell me the whole story,” Renny said.
“I’ve done that twice already.” The fatigue was back in Ryan’s voice. “Three times.”
“Yeah, but to other people, not to me. Not directly. I want to hear it myself, from you to me. Right from the moment these people stepped into St. F.’s until you arrived here in the ambulance. The whole thing. Don’t leave anything out.”
So Father Ryan began to talk and Renny listened, just listened, interrupting only for clarifications.
None of it made much sense.
“You mean to tell me,” he said when the priest had finished, “that they had this kid in their home for weekends, whole weeks at a time, and never laid a finger on him?”
“Treated him like a king, according to Danny.”
“And then as soon as the adoption is official, the guy slices the kid up. What’s the story there? What’s it mean?”
“It means I screwed up, that’s what it means!”
Renny saw the tortured look in Father Ryan’s eyes and felt for him. This guy was hurting.
“You did all the routine checks?”
The priest jumped up from the sofa and began pacing the length of the small room, rubbing his hands together as he moved back and forth.
“That and more. Sara and Herb Lom came up as white as that snow falling outside. But it wasn’t enough, was it?”
“Speaking of this Sara—any idea where she is?”
“Probably dead, her body hidden somewhere back at that house. Damn! How could I let this happen?”
Renny noticed that he wasn’t passing the buck, wasn’t blaming anyone but himself. Here was one of the good guys. Weren’t too many of those around.
“No system is perfect,” Renny said in what he knew was a pretty lame attempt to console the poor guy.
The priest looked at him, sat back down on the sofa, and buried his face in his hands. But he didn’t cry. They sat that way in silence for a while until a doctor in surgical scrubs barged in. He was graying, in his fifties, probably robust looking when he hit the golf course, but he was pasty faced and sweaty now. Looked like he’d been on a week-long bender.
“I’m looking for the man who brought Daniel Gordon in. Which one of you—?”
Father Ryan suddenly was on his feet again, in the doctor’s face. “That’s me! Is he all right? Did he pull through?”
The doctor sat down and ran a hand over his face. Renny noticed that it was shaking.
“I’ve never seen anyt
hing like that boy.”
“Neither has anyone!” the priest shouted. “But is he going to live?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t mean his injuries. I’ve seen people mangled in car wrecks worse than that. What I mean is he should be dead. He should have been dead when he was wheeled in here.”
“Yes, but he wasn’t,” Ryan said, “so what’s the point of—?”
“The point is that he lost too much blood to have survived. You found him. Was there much blood there?”
“All over. I remember thinking that I never knew the human body could hold so much blood.”
“That was a good thought. Was he bleeding when you found him?”
“Uh, no. I didn’t think about it then, but now that I look back … no. He wasn’t bleeding. I guess he’d just run out of blood.”
“Bingo!” said the doctor. “Exactly what happened. He ran out of blood. Do you hear what I’m saying: There was no blood in that boy’s body when he got here! He was dead!”
Renny felt the skin at the back of his neck tighten. This doc was sounding crazy. Maybe he’d been on that bender after all.
“But he was conscious!” Ryan said. “Screaming!”
The doctor nodded. “I know. And he remained conscious through the entire operation.”
“Jesus!”
Renny felt like someone had just driven a fist into his gut.
Father Ryan dropped back onto the sofa.
“We couldn’t find any veins,” the doctor said, talking to the air. “They were all flat and empty. You see that in hypovolemic shock, but the child wasn’t in shock. He was awake, screaming in pain. So I did a cut-down, found a vein, and canulated it. Tried to draw a blood sample for typing but it was dry. So we started running dextrose and saline in as fast as it would go and took him upstairs to start suturing him up. That was when the real craziness started.”
The doc paused and Renny saw a look on his face that he’d occasionally seen on older cops, thirty-year men who thought they’d seen everything, thought they were beyond being shocked, and then learned the hard way that this city never revealed the full breadth of its underside; it always held something in reserve for the wise guy who thought he’d seen it all. This doc probably had thought he’d seen it all. Now he knew he hadn’t.
The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Page 170