Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  Chapter Five

  1

  IT WAS ODD, PAT Mallory thought, how quiet you got inside, when you finally knew what you had to do.

  He was standing in the middle of the woman’s apartment, looking not at the corpse but at the photographs, as he had been looking at nothing but the photographs since he first saw them. By now he had identified the figures in most of them. The figures of the adults would have been hard to mistake. The children were sometimes identifiable and sometimes not. All the boys who had been killed showed up in one of the photographs or another. So did a few boys Pat knew nothing about. So did Denny Grissom, the boy now in the hospital. The adults were a kind of honor guard of New Haven city politics.

  He had picked out the photograph of Dan Murphy almost first thing. Actually, it was a photograph of Dan and his brother Andy, good old harmless, ineffectual Andy, getting together to beat up on a single terrified little boy. All the boys looked terrified, except the ones that looked dead. The impression was so overwhelming Pat thought he could drown in it. What would happen if they went to wherever these boys were and got them out? What could happen? For most of them, the juvenile system would take over and they’d be lost. For the rest, there would be years and years of therapy that probably wouldn’t work, and they’d be lost anyway. Reality was a paralyzing thing. So was realism. He was looking at the yearbook album of an army, an army of men with power—and, in one case, of a woman with power, too. Half the prosecutor’s office was tacked up on these walls. So was a good proportion of the Special Investigative Unit of the police force. So was the head of New Haven Social Services and the man who was supposed to supervise the city’s homeless children’s shelter. So was the chairman of the board of directors of New Haven’s leading private action group for Children’s Rights. If he found that apartment and got the boys out, if he arrested all the adults in these photographs—who the hell would prosecute them? There were three judges up on those walls. Who the hell would supervise the trials? Did everybody do this, everybody on earth, or was it just New Haven, just here? His muscles were locked into place and his mind was frozen solid. The whole world had been taken over by pod people.

  And then, of course, it hit him. What he had to do.

  “Ben,” he said.

  Ben was next to him in a second, babbling nonsense. “They couldn’t have been hers, these pictures, he must have brought them here, they couldn’t have belonged to her because—”

  “Of course they couldn’t.”

  “The lawyers will say—”

  “Never mind the lawyers, Ben. Who else has seen what’s in this room?”

  “Dbro.”

  “Just Dbro?”

  “I haven’t let anyone else in.”

  “Has Dbro talked to anyone about this?”

  “I don’t think so. I think he’s—keeping it. To spring on people later.”

  “All right,” Pat said. “The first thing you’re going to do is, go down to your car—you and Dbro came together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Go down to your car and disconnect the radio. Get your hand up under the dash and pull the wires straight out and stash them someplace. Not in the car.”

  “Dbro will—”

  “You tell Dbro I’m sending him off someplace, this is an emergency—he’ll believe that—he’s going down to Danbury or someplace on total blackout. I don’t care what you make up to get him out of here but get him out of here, is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “The next thing you do is you start making some phone calls,” Pat said. “Roger Farnum, the crime guy from the Register. Jack Meskowitz, who strings for the New York Times—”

  “The New York Times? Pat, what the hell—”

  “I’m covering our asses,” Pat said. “I’m making sure we put these people out of commission once and for all—”

  “The evidence will be contaminated—”

  “The evidence is fucking useless under the circumstances. I’m going to take some of it, Ben. Any of these guys wants a nice clean photograph, you send him to me and tell them I’m handing them out.”

  “But—”

  “Do it. Meskowitz also strings for Time. Then there’s that woman, what’s her name, Linda somebody who does the true crime stuff for Connecticut magazine and Diane Smith from Action News—oh, crap, Ben, you know who’s honest.”

  “Yes,” Ben said, “I know.”

  Pat was taking photographs off the couch and stuffing them in his jacket pocket. He took the one of Dan and Andy and the boy. He took the one with the smug, self-righteous bastard of a psychiatrist in it.

  “You can make those telephone calls from here,” he said. “When you get done with Dbro I want you back in this room and I want you to stay here until those reporters have seen what they’re going to come to see. Nobody else in or out. Nobody. Not techies. Not police photographers. Not even Anton Klemmer.”

  “Pat, for God’s sake.”

  “Do it,” Pat said again, “and do it fast. I’ve got to get out of here. There’s something I forgot.”

  2

  There was something he’d forgotten, forgotten completely, lost in the blackout. Even staring at that picture of Dan and Andy and the boy hadn’t made him remember it. Even the picture of Denny Grissom hadn’t made him remember it. Remember, remember, remember. Remember what?

  Remember that he had sent Susan Murphy back to that house, back to her brothers, back to a pair of psychopaths who could be trusted only to make sure that anything they touched turned to blood.

  Remember that the very last time he had seen her, she had been having trouble with her front door.

  Chapter Six

  1

  THE FIRST TIME HE shot, he aimed at her foot. The bullet went wide and buried itself into the rug, a gorgeously colored, red, green, and black Persian that must have cost ten thousand dollars when it was bought in 1956. She didn’t understand why she was thinking of the color and price of rugs. She didn’t understand anything.

  The next time he shot, he aimed at her head—and came closer. She felt the breeze of it along her cheek and heard the impact on the door frame behind her like an explosion. Not a mini-explosion, but a real one. It was that close and that loud. It hit her that she had to get out of here and get out of here now, or she would be dead.

  She was spending so much time thinking about Andy, she had forgotten that Dan was in the room. He came up on her right side and reached for her, his long arms outstretched in the air like sticks with claws, his face the mask of something that was not really an emotion. She saw him just in time and stepped back. Her movement put her just out of the range of Andy’s third shot, aimed at her chest.

  If she had not moved, she would have been hit.

  In the dark of this night the house was too quiet and too big. There was rain coming down outside and beating against the window at the end of the hall. She ran and ran and felt like she was getting nowhere, but knew she was. She had only one chance and it was this: that years ago, when they were all being ground to nothingness beneath their father’s drinking and their mother’s craziness, the boys had been allowed to escape into the outside world and she had not. There were a hundred places in the house that they knew nothing about but she did.

  Andy was standing in the doorway to his room, firing and firing. She could hear the sharp whine of bullets in propulsion in the air around her. The gun never seemed to run out of ammunition and Andy never seemed to run out of steam. A bullet hit the jade porcelain vase her mother had brought back from Venice in 1959 and shattered it. Another bullet hit the feet of the crucifix that had hung at the top of the landing for as long as Susan could remember. The feet splintered into a hundred pieces that flew into the air like magic darts.

  She reached the landing and turned, blindly, heading downstairs. She got halfway to the foyer and stopped.

  Standing in front of her was a small boy, no more than ten or twelve, with a face like a Botticelli angel. At any othe
r moment in her life she would have been able to place him: the boy who had been with Francesca that first morning at Damien House, the boy Francesca had called Mark.

  At this moment the only thing she could place was the identity of the object he was holding in his right hand, jutting it up into the air at her as he came toward her, cutting through the thick fog of this wonderland she had fallen into and smiling while he did it. It was a stainless-steel carving knife with a sharp point at its end and it was covered with blood.

  “It was your fault,” he said, as calmly as if he were reciting sums in an arithmetic class. “The Holy Spirit told me so. It was your fault because you got a divorce from Holy Mother Church.”

  Susan turned, headed up the stairs again, and prayed to God she made it to the attic.

  2

  “This is a seven-oh alert,” Pat Mallory was saying into the radio, “this is a seven-oh alert. Edge Hill Road. Murphy house. Number seventeen. This is a seven-oh alert and we want—”

  “Stop,” the patrolman beside him said. “Mallory, what are you doing?”

  Pat wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing except driving, except running the siren at full blast. He was in a patrol car instead of his own, because he hadn’t wanted to even chance getting stopped by the one cop in the city who didn’t know what he drove. He was keeping the police band open and not giving the dispatcher a chance to ask the usual questions. He was doing a hundred things that would have been appropriate only for the start of a nuclear holocaust and he didn’t give a flying fuck.

  He came up Chapel Street at eighty miles an hour. He came up Prospect at eighty-five. By the time he was on Edge Hill Road he was doing ninety, and the car was damn near out of control. The nightly freeze had set in and the rain was turning to sleet. The whole street was paved with ice.

  “Lieutenant,” the patrolman said, “you’ve got to give them a chance to answer you. They may have questions. They may need to know—”

  “They know what they need to know. Number seventeen Edge Hill Road.”

  “Lieutenant—”

  Number seventeen Edge Hill Road was just ahead. The lights in the foyer were lit. So were the lights on either side of the door. Nothing else was. He pumped his brake frantically, skidded, righted himself again, and then pulled up to the curb.

  The place looked as quiet as a Catholic church.

  3

  In the attic it was not silent, and Susan knew that if she had heard the sirens, the rest of them had heard them, too. She drew her knees to her chest and tucked her head under a rafter. She was in the hollow place between the attic ceiling and the underside of the roof. She had gotten there just in time. When she had come back up to the landing, running from Mark and the knife, Andy had been waiting for her, gun in hand, legs apart, set up like a SWAT raider ready to burst through the door of some drug lord’s apartment. She had ducked at the last minute and the shot had gone over her head, down the stairs. She had dived between his legs and gotten to the other side. Dan was there, hands out to catch her like a quarterback ready to catch a hiked ball. She rolled to the side and headed back the way she had come, running as she had never run before in her life.

  The door to the attic stairs was at the far end of the hall. It locked from the inside like a bathroom door. The lock was useless at keeping anyone out. She had never understood why it had been put there to begin with. She ran up the narrow curving flight and pulled the door shut behind her, locked the door anyway, even though it wouldn’t work.

  She had just made it into her hiding place when she heard them coming up behind her, not just Dan and Andy, but the other one, too. The one she knew as Mark.

  “Charlie,” Andy was saying, “Charlie, for God’s sake, what are you doing, what’s wrong?”

  Susan stuck her head between her knees and tried very hard not to laugh.

  4

  DOWN ON THE STREET, Pat Mallory was out on the pavement, running up the sidewalk, opening the front door. He stopped in the foyer under the light from the chandelier and listened to silence that was not silence. The house was quiet but inhabited. He could feel it. He went to the double doors that looked into the living room, turned on the light, and saw nothing. He went to the windows that formed the wall at the living room’s back and looked out at nothing again. The patrolman came up behind him with his gun drawn and pointed it at the statue in the fountain.

  “Listen,” Pat told him. “Listen. Someone’s walking.”

  Someone was walking. Far above them, someone was walking. Far above them, someone got off a shot that sounded as loud as a shot on an indoor firing range.

  Pat Mallory ran out of the living room and up the stairs.

  5

  It had finally happened. Susan realized it as soon as the sound of the shot had died away. It had finally happened. Andy’s gun had run out of ammunition. Andy had run out of ammunition.

  The quiet in the attic was so deep it might as well have been the quiet of a well. They might as well have been underground. Susan felt as if she had a rock pressing down on her, squeezing the air out of her chest.

  She put her eye next to the only crack in the wall beside her and tried to look out into the attic. She saw the legs of Dan’s pants and nothing at all of Andy. She saw Mark.

  He was standing in the middle of the floor with his legs spread apart and his arms out, in just that same position Andy had used when he fired on the landing, except that instead of a gun Mark was carrying the knife. There was light coming in from somewhere. It caught the blade and made the clean parts of it gleam. The clean parts were like stars in a dark night. There weren’t that many of them and they were small.

  “My name isn’t Charlie,” Mark said. “My name is Mark Harrigan and I’m from Oxford, Connecticut, and I remember everything.”

  6

  Down on the second floor, Pat Mallory had stopped in the hallway—stopped to look at the shattered vase, the broken crucifix, the aftersigns of bullets that had gone into the walls and the floor. There were casings everywhere. It looked like there had been a war up here, to the death. The soldiers had all killed each other and disappeared and left their battlefield empty.

  He walked slowly down the hall, stopping at every door, opening every door. The rooms were all empty.

  Behind him, the patrolman was repeating the process, just in case.

  Two doors from the end of the hall on the left side, Pat Mallory got to Andy Murphy’s room. He didn’t know it was Andy Murphy’s room. He only knew it was full of photographs, just like the room of that woman down on Sullivan Street. He looked on the floor and saw the crumpled heap of boy’s clothing, the mess on them that had to be blood. He raised his head and heard the sirens coming up outside.

  He had just decided to go back down and meet them when Susan’s voice exploded over his head.

  “No,” she shouted. “No, Dan, no, don’t you dare touch him.”

  7

  She had only been able to see a little sliver of space, but she had seen this. Andy coming for the boy named Mark and Mark with the knife out, with the knife ready. She kept thinking that it was right, not Christian, but still right, she wanted to see Andy dead and bloody on the attic floor at this boy’s hand. Then the sliver was clouded with a blacker thing and she realized in shock that she had forgotten again, forgotten about Dan.

  Dan was coming up on the boy’s other side the way he had come up on hers. The boy was paying no attention. He was too crazy to pay any attention. Even in her hiding place, she could see that. Dan was reaching out for the boy and Andy was backing up, backing up, putting the boy in position.

  Susan grabbed the loose board she had used to get into the space and pulled it, hard, so hard that she cracked it in half. The sharp smack of it went across the attic as if another gun had gone off and they both turned. Both her brothers turned. The boy did not. Susan could see the boy coming up on Andy, moving steadily, not changing plans at all and she let him come.

  “No,” she shouted at
Dan. “No, Dan, no, don’t you dare touch him.”

  “Fucking holy bitch,” Dan said.

  That was when the boy’s knife came down on Andy’s neck, slashing into the side of it, cutting across the windpipe and coming through the other side.

  8

  A second later the attic door burst open and Pat Mallory launched himself in, went down on his knees, and fired.

  He caught Dan Murphy in midair, with a shot to the heart that went in clean.

  He caught Mark Harrigan with the knife in his hands, staring at the damned thing as if he’d never seen it before.

  He caught Susan Murphy fainting.

  Epilogue

  1

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK ON THE morning of Tuesday, December 23, Denny Grissom woke up. Pat Mallory was there to see it—although he didn’t. He was sitting at the back of the PICU waiting room with his legs stretched over a coffee table, fast asleep. It had been a long night after a month of long nights, made even longer by the realization that he had panicked, just a little. Those photographs they had found in Martha O’Connell’s room had not really included every public official in the city of New Haven. They hadn’t even included most of them. What he hadn’t noticed in his first shock he noticed later: there were a lot of repeats. Now he had two major problems on his hands and no idea what to do about either of them. There was the Case itself, not quite ruined by all the publicity he had made sure it got. It had a special prosecutor down from Hartford, an investigative unit from the state police, and little clots of men from the U.S. Marshal’s office and the FBI, all swarming around, trying to work it into something they could understand. Then there was the Fallout, as Susan persisted in calling it: the body of Father John Kelly, found in a window seat on the first floor along with the body of the very last boy; the boys they had found when they had finally raided The Apartment; and Mark Harrigan. Any civilian bright enough to spend his Saturday nights watching reruns of “Hill Street Blues” would have thought that Mark Harrigan was part of the Case, and no cop would have expected him to be. He was not only a twelve-year-old child, but crazy as a loon.