Mann was angry, then defiant, and finally, sad. He wasn’t sure how to handle those feelings, or if he wanted to handle them at all. “Your theory’s interesting,” he said as they sped along the avenue, “but how I do my job is none of your business.”
She turned to him with a puzzled expression. “Of course it’s my business. You killed my sister.”
Mann pursed his lips as grief crept up from the place where he’d hidden it from everyone, including himself.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked with a compassion Mann hadn’t expected.
“I’ve already talked to a counselor about it,” he said quietly. “They make you do that after police shootings.”
“And I’m guessing you told that counselor what he wanted to hear,” she said. “Then you told Sandy and everyone else that you’re fine. But you’re not fine, are you? A man like you doesn’t just forget about taking a life. He sits in it, hurts from it, and unless he talks about it, he dies a little bit every day.”
“What do you mean, ‘a man like me’?”
“I mean the kind of man who knows what it’s like to lose someone.”
Mann’s eyes grew vacant as he thought of losing his father to a murderer’s bullet. He wondered, each time he thought of what he’d done, if he was a murderer, too. Lenore could sense that, so she tried to give him a measure of peace.
“I need you to know something,” she said as he made himself look at the road ahead. “I need you to know that I forgive you for what happened to Mary. I don’t know if that’ll make any difference in how you feel about it, but I think that’s one of the reasons I’m here—to tell you that you’re forgiven.”
Mann hesitated, unsure how to respond. He thought of the long nights he’d spent with Sandy after the shootings, and how she’d never been able to reach him. He thought of talking to the counselor and never feeling relief. He thought of consulting his mother and not feeling better. And yet, here was this woman he barely knew, speaking the words that caused the weight to slowly lift from his shoulders.
There were only two words left for him to say, and he spoke them in a strong, clear voice. “Thank you.”
A few minutes later, they drove past a black gate and into a driveway on a quiet street at the city’s outer edge. The tree-lined community was known as Chestnut Hill. It was a haven of sorts, where the people were fiercely liberal and the property values were extremely high.
This community, with its quaint shops, suburban feel, and fairytale dwellings, was the last place anyone would look for a murder witness.
As the cops who’d followed them emerged from the other car and Charlie Mann led Lenore into the house, Mann took extra care to make sure she was properly protected. She gratefully accepted his help.
Their truce was real but tenuous. Mann was thankful that she’d given him some peace, but he was wary of her gift. Lenore felt odd in the presence of the man who’d killed her sister, yet she was strangely drawn to him.
As Mann set her up in the safe house, they each knew they’d have to learn to accept their dependence on each other. Lenore needed Mann for protection, and Mann needed Lenore for truth.
Nearly everything else in their lives was in doubt. They’d both seen enough to know that. But amidst the uncertainty, they were sure of one thing. The killer was out there, and eventually he’d have to surface.
CHAPTER 9
A pale man wearing a Phillies cap over his jet-black hair walked out into the cool afternoon and stood on the curb near a Fairmount Avenue apartment building. The art museum area, which bordered the park, had undergone a tremendous rebirth in the past twenty years. The juvenile jail had given way to plans for a museum. Poverty had been replaced by affluence.
Here, in a neighborhood filled with condos and custom townhouses, colorful shops and cafés, no one questioned the killer’s presence on the street. After replacing his nineteenth-century greatcoat with a cap, gray sweats, and worn running shoes, he looked as if he belonged. The neighbors couldn’t have known that he’d just left a room carved out from the soil of a graveyard. They couldn’t have known that his stony stare was the heartless gaze of a killer. They weren’t close enough to know that he smelled of blood and damp earth. They only knew that he appeared to be normal, and that was enough for them.
Standing less than a mile from the spot in the park where he’d murdered Officer Frank Smith after eliminating Clarissa Bailey, he could still see dozens of police cars blocking the entrance to Kelly Drive. But in spite of their presence, the killer stood his ground, because here, he was just one of the anonymous faces that traversed the pristine streets near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
He thought back to the text he’d received earlier, and he patted his pocket to make sure he’d remembered to bring the phone. As much as he wanted to rebel against the order, he’d spent too much time formulating his plan to deviate from it. He would proceed to phase 2 as planned, and he’d work within the established time frame.
It was odd the way things had come about. The murder of his wife the year before had created in him an unbearable grief. He thought if he could learn about death, if perhaps he could understand it better, the grief would subside. Thus began his morbid fascination with death. He read about it in books, researched it online, and went to a mentor who sat on the Fairgrounds board to ask if he could volunteer at the cemetery. He was given three weeks to do so, and over the course of that time, the grief did anything but go away. In fact, it transformed into outright rage. He didn’t know if there was anyone who could understand how he felt. That is, until he found the raven.
It was in a remote area of the cemetery, near a three-story-high piece of rock that stood at least fifty yards from the nearest grave. The bird was standing over its fallen mate, its demeanor defensive and its manner uncertain. Like all ravens, this one had mated for life, and when its mate died, the raven didn’t know what to do. The man understood that, and so he took his anger and grief and focused it on a new goal. He would train the raven to live again, and in doing so, the man would learn to live again, too.
He’d heard that ravens had guarded the Tower of London for centuries and that a series of keepers had trained the birds to do so. Knowing that ravens are dangerous carnivores who can pluck out a human’s eye if provoked, he researched the trainers’ methods and adopted them as his own.
The day after he spotted the raven, the man returned with all manner of food for the bird—from eggs and cow livers to mice. He left the food near the area where the dead mate lay and watched from a distance. The raven refused to eat. The man repeated his trek for a second day. Still, the raven refused to eat. On the third day, the man brought a different type of food. It was the heart of a lamb. The raven ate. From that point on, the raven regained his strength, and it was almost as if he’d been resurrected.
When his time volunteering at the cemetery was completed, the man continued to come back to see the raven. Over the next year, the raven and the man bonded. There were disagreements, as evidenced by the deep gouge the raven had inflicted on the man’s left forearm, but over time, they both came to understand what they needed in order to live again. They needed the power to overcome whatever they faced, and when the man recalled Dr. Workman’s theory, he trained the raven to help him get that power. He trained the raven to help him get Lenore.
Now, as he stood on Fairmount Avenue, fresh from the execution of the first part of his plan, the man who’d trained the raven placed his hands on his hips and twisted his body, preparing for an afternoon jog. Cars passed by, and their drivers cast perfunctory glances, but none of them was suspicious. In their minds, if the man could afford the luxury of a midday jog in one of the city’s most trendy areas, he was above reproach.
As the dome lights from nearby police cars glowed red and blue in the crisp autumn air, the killer continued to warm up for his short jog, bending his neck to the left until the bones cracked loudly, then bending it to the right until they cracked again. Grabbin
g his left foot, he pulled his leg toward his back, and did the same with his right. Then he bent and touched his toes, holding the pose for a full ten seconds before plucking an iPod from his pocket and sticking the earplugs in his ears.
With another glance at the police cars that were gathered just blocks away, he turned and jogged east on Fairmount Avenue, running toward nearby Eastern State Penitentiary, the long-closed prison whose thick, castlelike walls had once housed Al Capone.
He jogged past the gas station and the water ice stand, beyond the bars and the restaurants, and as the autumn breeze whispered in the air around him, he turned up the volume on his iPod and listened intently to his favorite poem.
“The Raven” had opened the door to a whole new world for him. It was a world where his mind could go beyond any boundaries. It was a world where he could achieve anything he could think. It was a world where he could dominate everything around him. He simply needed to find the woman who would lead him to Poe’s secret.
He listened to the poem while he ran, his heart pounding as the reader’s voice rose and fell with the cadence of each verse. He listened to the words of love and hate, life and death, good and evil. His breath came faster as he listened to each stanza, and every time he heard the name Lenore, he got excited. Each time he heard the tortured, mournful words of love and loss, he felt energized. Each time he thought of the true meaning of that poem, he moved faster. By the time he reached the final verse, which spoke of souls and shadows, he felt almost as if his own soul had come out from the shadows. He felt almost as if he, like the raven, could fly.
With Poe’s words reverberating in his mind, he ran as the sour smell of damp earth emanated from his skin like sweat. The vacant look in his jet-black eyes seemed to harden with each step he took.
He knew Workman’s theories intimately. He’d read all the works the professor had written and had followed those who followed him. That was how he knew that Lenore Wilkinson was the seer they’d all sought. Now that she’d come to Philadelphia, he was nearing the end of his race. But Clarissa Bailey and the cop who’d gotten in his way weren’t the only obstacles he’d have to clear. There were others, and if he was to have the chance to reap the rewards he so desperately sought, they’d have to be eliminated as well.
For that reason, he ran, unconcerned with the police who were seeking him. He ran, unafraid of the fate that awaited him. He ran, believing that he could traverse the quarter mile to his waiting car without incident. This whole thing, after all, was about the power of the mind. If he believed in his mind that he could make it, then reality should bend to his will.
As he ran toward the car that would take him to his next destination, he passed the walls of Eastern State, the prison whose history of solitary confinement had been blamed for driving inmates insane. The killer didn’t know he was losing his own tenuous grip on reality. He only knew that he was going to find out what he could from the man who’d convinced him to believe.
He looked up in the sky above him and saw a familiar sight, circling and soaring on the autumn breeze. The raven’s wings were extended to their full four feet. He circled effortlessly, his wings capturing the power of the air. The man almost smiled at the sight of the raven, watching over him as the man had once watched over the bird. He saw the raven and in that split second, he forgot about the danger he faced in being outside. In the next instant, he was reminded.
A black Ford slowed as it passed by, and the driver cast a long, lingering glance in his direction. Everyone had heard the description by now. The killer was a white man, tall and powerful with jet-black hair and eyes to match. His skin was extremely pale, he had a mustache, and he was dressed in a black coat with the wide lapels and the numerous buttonholes of a time gone by.
The woman in the car was perceptive—too much so. When she saw him, she slowed and took a second look. This jogger seemed to have everything but the mustache and the clothing, so she stopped and looked again. Pulling over and putting the car in park, she looked away from the jogger and reached for the cell phone in her pocketbook on the passenger seat. Before she could pull it out to call the police, her driver’s-side door flew open. The man was upon her.
He punched her once, and the bone in her nose crunched into a dozen pieces. Thick maroon-colored blood poured down her face and back into her throat. She was choking on it. Gasping for breath, she reached up to try to fend him off, but he was much too strong. With one powerful hand, he grabbed her throat and squeezed until her windpipe collapsed. Still holding her throat, he pushed her aside and climbed into the driver’s seat. With the other hand he closed the door to the car. He pushed the woman down into the space between the glove compartment and the seat, looked up into the sky, and saw the raven dip his left wing into the autumn breeze and fly north.
The killer put the car in drive and turned north as well. He wouldn’t need his car after all.
* * *
Charlie Mann hung up the phone after placing the last of his calls to headquarters. Then he cracked the blinds, looked out onto the tree-lined street, and watched a breeze blow red and orange leaves toward the car where the cops sat watching the front of the house.
There were only eight houses on the entire block. They were all huge, with winding driveways and expansive lawns, shade trees and two-car garages. There were no white picket fences here. Instead, there were huge black gates that hid abusers and drunks and unhappy wives. Each morning, when the gates were thrown open, the denizens of this street donned the masks they wore in their daily lives and told themselves that everything was all right.
If you could hide whole lives in such a place, it made perfect sense to hide witnesses there, too. The department had done so for years, and today was no different.
Mann shut the blinds after looking once more at the patrolmen who were parked in a car on the driveway. Then he turned from the window and saw Lenore sitting on the couch watching round-the-clock coverage of the murders. He walked across the hardwood floor and sat down on a chair across from her.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“I’ve been better.”
“Yeah, me, too,” he said, glancing at the television and seeing Clarissa Bailey’s face onscreen once more. “Doesn’t it bother you to watch that?”
She looked at him and smiled nervously. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t.”
“So why are you doing it?”
Lenore sat there for a moment, searching for the words to express what she was feeling. “I guess I’m trying to understand my place in it all. I didn’t understand that cryptogram, I didn’t sense anything at the cemetery, but after hearing the ranger back at the Poe house, I feel like I’m supposed to be able to see something in all this.”
“Maybe you’re trying too hard.”
“Or maybe I’m not trying hard enough,” she said with a forlorn sigh. “I’ve always had trouble seeing things that are too close to me.”
Mann looked at her curiously. “Why do you think that is?”
“Because it’s easier to look at other people than it is to look inside. I think that’s true for everybody.”
“Yeah, but we’re not talking about everybody right now.”
Lenore knew he was right, but she didn’t have an answer—at least, not one that she wanted to give.
Mann watched her for a few seconds. Then he looked off into the distance. “I would love to have a gift like yours,” he said with more than a touch of envy in his voice. “To be able to look into people’s lives and see the truth.”
“It’s more like a curse than a gift,” Lenore said. “The truth is the ugliest thing in the world, and when you look in a person’s face and see it, sometimes you just want to run and hide.”
“Is that why you’re hiding from yourself?” Mann asked.
Lenore looked at him and smirked. “I think you’re the one who’s the psychic.”
“No, I’m just an observer. That’s my job as a detective. I look at a set of fact
s and come up with a theory that fits.”
“So what have you observed about me?”
“You want the truth?”
“I already told you the truth is ugly. Why would I want it?” Lenore asked with a grin. Her smile quickly faded when Mann began to speak.
“I’ve only got a few facts about you, but here they are,” he said soberly. “Your father cheated on his wife with your mother, and because of that, you had a hard time in the town where you grew up. You can see things that other people can’t, but you use that gift reluctantly, if at all. You’re twenty-nine and you claim not to know who you are outside of your connections to other people. One of those people is a man who married you but doesn’t seem to care for you. Another was your sister, who happened to be a serial killer. The fact that you came here to learn about a woman who didn’t even like you is amazing to me. The fact that you stayed says even more.”
Mann stopped and looked at Lenore as tears streamed down her cheeks. He felt no guilt for making her cry. At least the tears were honest.
“Then there’s the biggest fact of all,” he said, staring at her as he spoke. “Clarissa Bailey believed you could unlock the truth about Poe, and when she found you, someone killed her.”
Lenore wiped her eyes and whispered the only question that mattered. “So based on the facts you have,” she said in a raspy voice, “what’s your theory?”
“I think you’ve always blamed yourself for the way Mary and her family treated you and your mother. You figured if you came here and found out some things about your sister, it might help you stop hating yourself. But when you got here and learned that you might actually have value, it scared you. Now you don’t know what to do.”
There was a long pause. Then she wiped her eyes again and looked at him. “So that’s it, huh?”
“For the moment.”
“And you’re expecting more facts, I suppose?”
“Of course I am. Until we solve the crime, there’s always more to learn.”
The Gravedigger's Ball Page 14