by Harker Moore
Hysteria. What followed was hysteria. From their piteous weeping to the urgent screams and churning hiccups contorting their faces and chests. To his own hysteria, running dark and deep and uncontrollable.
He stood rooted. His heart pumping in strangled beats. His limbs paralyzed with the truth of his failure. He let them scream. There was no hearing them beyond these walls. All the wounding their cries would do had already taken place.
He left them finally, going to the area that was the kitchen. He removed the pitcher from the refrigerator, brimming with the cheap punch that had turned out to be what little foxes liked best. They would wear themselves out soon enough. Their throats raw and ready.
He poured the cherry-colored stuff into the plastic cups that were printed with ponies, insipid docile beasts. The bottle had been waiting in the cabinet overhead. He got it down. Measured it into the drinks.
CHAPTER
29
Oh, God, I look awful. Who invented these kinds of lights? It had to be a man. Willie had finished brushing her teeth, was staring at herself in the rest room mirror, trying to decide if it was possible to rescue her more-than-day-old makeup. She returned the brush and toothpaste to their little plastic bag and threw them back in her purse. Then, running the water cold, she splashed some in her face, trying to avoid contact with her mascara.
Fishing for tissues and the lipstick that was the only item of makeup in the overburdened satchel, she patted her skin dry and blended two dots of color in her cheeks before applying the lipstick to her mouth. She supposed she looked better, and tried to believe that the effort had been solely to please herself, that Michael’s being here had nothing at all to do with it.
She could not remember a more difficult eighteen hours. Two paths to one dead end. Michael’s instinct in parallel with Jimmy’s good police work. But the suspect had disappeared. Last seen by Michael as he’d descended subway stairs. Another layer of guilt. She knew Michael feared that his tail of St. Cyr had been spotted, that this had been the thing that had driven him underground, literally as well as figuratively. All night in Jimmy’s office she’d watched it tear him apart. And not a thing she could do about it.
The truth of it was that their inability to locate St. Cyr was making them all crazy. Discreet surveillance had been set up around the building, but the man had not returned to his apartment. Legally speaking, they had no grounds for a warrant. Certainly, the few CDs by rave artists that Michael had found in St. Cyr’s collection would not be enough to convince a judge.
Michael had been through the place thoroughly, and had found nothing else, though he had lifted a good set of prints which they presumed to be St. Cyr’s. Nothing that could ever be used in a court, but Talbot had run them, was still running them through every possible database. So far with no result.
David St. Cyr was a phantom, a man who’d left no trace of his life before his university days at Tulane. They were in the process of an extensive background check, but the lack of information pointed strongly to an identity manufactured at that point.
The question they had been arguing over for hours was how soon they should become more aggressive. It was possible to put out an APB for St. Cyr as a person of interest, a move that would instantly be picked up by the media and trumpeted everywhere. The problem was they did not actually know that St. Cyr was aware of police scrutiny. Even if he had spotted him, Michael was just a man in a car. There was every possibility that St. Cyr would come back to the apartment, if they took no measures guaranteed to alert him.
The best-case scenario was that patience would result in St. Cyr’s returning and leading them back to the twins, who might be alive in whatever place they were now. The worst case was that some action of theirs would push him to kill the boys and fall out of sight for good.
It might so easily happen. So many missing children were never found. Willie couldn’t imagine what that kind of nonresolution would do to Michael. Or maybe she could.
She returned to Jimmy’s office to find Darius standing exactly where she’d left him, at the window. Jimmy, at his desk, was brewing tea. She’d made a stop at the cold drink machine. Burnt out on black coffee, she’d kicked her diet and was chain-drinking Cokes. One shiny red can after another.
“Have I missed anything?” She sat down.
“No.” Jimmy shook his head. “But I need to make a decision.”
“On the APB?”
“Yes.” His gaze drifted to where Michael had not moved.
“I don’t know what to say that I haven’t said, Jimmy,” she began. “I—”
“Sir . . .” Talbot had appeared at the door with printouts in his hand.
Sakura turned to him. “You have something?”
“I think I may have.” Talbot came in. “And part of it’s been under my nose.”
“Show me,” Sakura said.
Michael had come over. All of them gathered round as Talbot laid the papers down on the desk. “Look at this.” He pointed to an entry in the DMV records. “A van, black, registered to a company, CyrUs, Inc. And I’d been checking the property records, looking for anything under David St. Cyr. Nothing had shown up. But CyrUs, Inc. owns a warehouse in the meatpacking district. CyrUs. David St. Cyr. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I called a buddy at the Department of Records and he checked. It’s St. Cyr’s name on the title.”
“That’s it,” Michael said.
She looked to Jimmy. Saw the calculation click. That made four of them who believed.
At first, upon awakening, Hanae had lifted a window to cold and sun. But clouds had come as the morning waned. She had felt their presence in the fading warmth that fell upon her arms and face as she stood within the open frame of air. It was a fitful day, when nothing would ease the thoughts that flitted like her finches from perch to perch in her mind, thoughts of all that had happened in the weeks since her return. How she had made her noise; how her husband had listened. How despite her clumsiness, healing had come. She and her Jimmy were not, and perhaps would never be, of one mind on the question of how deeply she should share in that part of his life that was work. But their diverging roads of the year past had returned them to a path that had widened to let them walk abreast.
She had turned from the window and sought a soothing task. Warm steam filled the air with the scent of laundered cotton as she sat pressing and folding the handkerchiefs that Jimmy liked to tuck like a talisman inside his pocket. An American expression came to her. Agree to disagree. Her Jimmy would wish to keep her apart from everything ugly in his work. She, no stranger to darkness, wished to share the burden of all that he must face. Agree to disagree. And make space for the other to walk.
His phone call last night had been more than the usual short explanation that the demands of his case would prevent his coming home. Jimmy had told her all that he could. That there was a lead they were developing. That Willie was with him. And Michael. Much unsaid there, but understood. The inclusion of Kenjin was defiance of regulation. And Michael and Willie’s working together in Jimmy’s small office with so much pain between them could not be an easy thing.
Perhaps she should regret her part in bringing Kenjin and Willie together, but she discovered she could not. Knew that her hope was that they would come together again. They were souls that fit, as she and Jimmy were.
She found herself smiling as she considered her husband’s patience these last weeks. She did not think she would test him with any more appearances at his crime scenes. It surprised her now that she had taken such measures. And it occurred to her that her restlessness today was a reflection of more than her fear for Kenjin’s sons and the peril that might be involved in finding them. What she felt was frustration for the uselessness of that gift she had found it so necessary to assert. For of what value had been her visions, her sense of close and growing danger, when they had counted for nothing in preventing Margot’s death or the taking of Kenjin’s sons? And indeed, she could offer no special insight on where
to find them now.
But her gift was a real one, and still she could hope for a time when it might make some critical difference, when the part given her to play would be more than understanding and support. And her husband, having tolerated her noise, might on that day hear her music. She prayed it would be so.
She had been folding and pressing as she thought these things. And placing a finished handkerchief on her pile, she reached into the basket for another dampened square. She smoothed it flat, hearing Taiko’s gentle snore as he dozed close by at her feet. A sound of contentment that pleased her. She lifted the iron, pressed it into the starch-soaked fabric.
The vision shook her in its suddenness. Familiar now, but with a difference. The garden no longer the garden of her childhood. A mother not hers. But the voice as musical. The words in English, soft and slow. The melon offered. The halves with their coarse and dimpled rinds balanced neatly in her palms. No hairy nest of fiber at each center, but a void at the heart that filled and overflowed with blood.. Dripping wanton scarlet through her fingers.
She came to herself with the odor of scorched cotton.
Sakura cut the siren as they approached the exit from West Street, running under radar now. He glanced across to the passenger seat where Darius sat looking rigidly ahead, as if the answers he needed might be found in the air that pushed against the windshield.
No conversation on the ride. Nothing to say. What little discussion between them had come before, at the office. A rapid give-and-take, with no doubt of the outcome, about how much of nothing they actually had on this man. A possible location now with this warehouse, but still no grounds for any kind of warrant.
One green eye and one blue was not a crime. Neither was it illegal to rent a room under an assumed name. Or to rent a room in a neighborhood where two missing boys and their murdered mother had lived. When you put it in legal terms—and a gut-rumble wouldn’t cut it—there was no way you could sell it to a judge.
So the plan was just he and Michael. Low-key. See what happened, and work from there. No backup called for. Which they both understood meant no one else to implicate in whatever was going to go down here.
He swung onto Washington and drove past the building. The warehouse was small by district standards, the windows of its storeys blacked out. He parked in No Parking and they got out of the car, Michael on the sidewalk ahead of him.
There was no bell at the entrance. Sakura knocked . . . waited . . . knocked. Interminable seconds before his fist went up again.
“Leave it, Jimmy,” Michael stopped him, looking away. “You should go.” He stared out at the street.
They stood together, silent on the cracked sidewalk. “They’re my kids,” Darius spoke again. “And you don’t need to know. . . .”
“We’re going in,” he said. “Both of us.”
“No warrant . . .”
“You want legal?” He cut through the bullshit. “It’s exigent circumstances, Michael. And we’re wasting time.”
Into the universe that was not the universe. He concentrated on the picture reflected in the mirror from the television monitor mounted on the wall. The surveillance camera was sweeping the outside world, and he feared the reality of the two men descending to the basement level. Yet he could console himself. It was after all only a reflection of a reflection of electronic impulses sent through the air. And then there was the matter of his brain interpreting the messages through the lenses of his eyes. That was the way with the looking glass. Alice knew so well. Reaching, he laid the flat of his hand against the cool surface. There was no denying the image. Of one blue eye and one green eye staring back at him. No denying the irony of reversal. How left became right, and right became left.
From the beginning it had been a dream. A dream before he had even known it as dream. A seed, sprouting in his wounded heart, sending tendrils deep, a bud bursting the surface, new life uncoiling, forcing its way out of destiny’s center.
But the dream had soured. The seed stifled by unforeseen realities. Slowly spoiling in his hands, as ghosts hovered in the background, lying in wait to shrivel and dry what had once been green and promising. And in his infantile anger and despair, the ghosts all bearing the face of his mother.
The basement was not dark. A yellow-green light seeped from a strip of neon over a sink; like putrid water it flooded the subterranean world of the warehouse. Michael had seen light like this before, but it had burned then, emanating from the body of a man with a gun pointing at him. And the smell of rot was familiar too. Of blood gone bad. Crawling wet in cracks and fissures, impervious to swipes of ammonia, resistant to abraded bleaching. His mouth, his throat, his lungs, his belly filled with its stench. Every membrane sucked up the flavor of dank decay.
A muffled sound forced him to turn toward where a large cooler droned. Hunched and pasty white, sunk in the dark depths of a corner. The flat of a gurney licked up the cadaverous illumination, and upon a stiff-sheeted table, the points and edges of surgical implements glittered like fins. Against a wall, a tall thick roll of Visqueen, like a cylinder of pale translucent skin.
And in the half-black space, the last breaths, the last blood-beats of the dead reverberated. A new noise. Almost not there. Darius turned. Sakura was behind him, looking up, toward a benign light, dry and warm, illuminating the stairway out of Hell.
Deathly quiet. He had never appreciated the full meaning of that phrase before. He walked bare-fleshed through the dark twinkling forest, pausing despite his haste at the spot where the kits had had their final frolic. Short of breath and he needed to hurry. Things yet to do. And he had to fill the quiet. Or he might hear Mother laughing, enjoying her revenge.
Damn Mother. He cursed the womb that had left him incomplete, one rotation short. Enough to damn him. Not all the energy he might suck from a thousand thousand deaths enough to transform deformity.
Things yet to do. He imagined the men he had seen on the monitor approaching his level. Unlike Mother, they were not going to win. A bitter smile. For at least, in the end, it was he who decided her victory. Granting it hours ago. The one prize she had always required.
Birnam Wood was the crazy thought in Sakura’s mind—the creeping forest that hailed Macbeth’s death. He inched steadily forward in the cavernous space, Darius just behind, their flashlights and drawn guns sweeping the weird landscape of artificial hillocks and potted trees that twinkled in the not-quite-silent dark.
He knew that Michael could hear what he heard, the sound growing clearer as they penetrated forward. The siren song of children’s voices. But Michael stuck to discipline, keeping pace with him and what they could see and be sure of. Data on which to base the next critical judgment.
The next few inches brought the TV into their line of vision. Set on a stump. Electronic halo flickering out of rhythm with the winking lights. Like a window-cut of color in the darkness; a videotape was playing. Jason and Damon in the fake forest, alive. But how long ago?
He saw the impact of the image hit Michael. Knew his hesitation in the intake of breath. One more decision to stick to the book. For the moment after. And the next.
It was his own flashlight that picked out the wire and plaster cave. That pinned the thing within it in its beam. A white curve of exposed back. A rickrack of bone that pushed at pallid flesh. Dead flesh.
“Michael . . .” The name tore itself from his mouth.
Darius saw, moved, on a wave of action that crashed them both forward. Darius, gun holstered, dropped to his knees ahead of him. Scrambling into the hole, pulling . . . dragging the first body out.
“Dead,” Michael said. Sakura’s own thought made real.
He was on his knees now, too. The beam from his flashlight following as Darius crawled farther, illuminating the two smaller bodies within, the twin heads bright copper against the nest of moss and leaves. But the lips and nails of both boys cyanotic, unmistakably blue.
He crabbed backward, his radio out, sitting on his heels. “Sakura.”
He gave his call number. “I have a medical emergency.” He barked out the location of the warehouse, his eyes still on Michael, watching his head go down over one small mouth. Then swiftly move to the other.
“Send the EMTs and whatever backup you’ve got in the area.” He was still snapping requests to dispatch. “And notify Crime Scene and my unit.”
A roger crackled back from the line.
“I need an ME van. And Linsky if he’s available.”
Another roger.
He bent quickly to the body at his feet. Flesh still warm, no obvious sign of injury, other than the piercings that decorated the man’s left side. He felt routinely for a pulse at the neck, the shadow lighting from the TV screen reflecting in the metal jewelry, shifting like water over the morbid features. The dead eyes stared back at him, dimmed but yet unclouded. One iris green. One blue.
Pun’kin Man! a tiny recorded voice rang from the boxed chatter of the video.
Pun’kin Man! a second sang.
He hurried to help Michael.
CHAPTER
30
“. . . and more details of Friday’s successful rescue of Jason and Damon Darius are slowly dribbling out.” Zoe turned into a close-up on camera three.
“This reporter has learned exclusively from sources close to the investigation that the warehouse in which the twins were found, along with their dead kidnapper, contained an artificial forest, complete with a molded landscape and potted trees strung with white Christmas lights. This evil wonderland, apparently constructed by serial killer and architect David St. Cyr himself, was all part of some complex fantasy that involved these innocent boys.
“In yesterday’s live press conference, hospital officials reported that the twins, who were released to return home with their stepfather, local financier Reese Redmond, seem to have recovered completely from the drug they were given. But none of us can help wondering about the long-term emotional impact of their experience on vulnerable three-year-old boys.