Another beat.
“Oh. That’s [unintelligible].” She sounded surprised, even nervous. “What? There’s static . . . I can’t really hear.”
Another beat.
“Fine. That’s good.” A definite note of relief. “What? All right, I’m going to walk outside and see if that helps.”
“Stop the tape,” Joe said, as the action swept on without any repeat of the woman’s voice.
Marisa, clearly surprised, stopped the tape. Everyone around the table—because that’s where they were all seated, in a big, happy family group crowded in with the remains of homemade muffins and cups of coffee littering the tabletop in front of them—looked at him inquiringly. Joe suppressed a sigh. In the past, when he’d investigated a crime, he’d worked either alone or with a small, select cadre of seasoned law-enforcement types. Eight wide-eyed civilians, plus Dave, were not the people he would have chosen to share this type of sensitive material with.
But asking everyone except Nicky, whose help he needed, to leave the room was clearly a waste of time. Number one, they had all heard the tape, most of them before he had, as Marisa had apparently played it for Leonora and company while he and Nicky were on the beach. Number two, he’d seen enough of how Nicky worked to know that what she knew, her family would worm out of her soon afterward.
So he might as well forget from the outset any idea of keeping this particular detail secret to the investigation.
And chalk it up: Such were the hazards of conducting police work in paradise.
Several of the family members opened their mouths to speak as soon as the tape was switched off. A few whats and whys even made it out into the open air before he managed to shut them down. Reminding himself of a kindergarten teacher, Joe went “Shh!” with a finger pressed to his lips and a monitory glance around the table.
“I need a couple of minutes here,” he said.
The group goggled at him but obediently fell silent.
“Could you replay the last part, please?” he asked Marisa. She nodded and reached toward the tape recorder. Then, to Nicky, Joe added, “I want you to listen to the phone call in the background and identify the voice for me, if you can.”
At his signal, Marisa replayed the tape.
The dominant sound was a set of rapid footsteps and quickened breathing, echoed by a number of less distinct footsteps and some rustling, as if a whole group of people were moving in the same general direction at once.
Then, in the background, came the barely audible conversation that Joe had picked up on before.
It was short, only a few seconds, and when it ended, it was followed almost instantly by Nicky’s voice.
“We’re heading for the second floor now,” Nicky said on the tape, her voice clear and easily recognizable.
Joe signaled to Marisa to turn off the tape. The whole time he’d been listening to it, he was watching Nicky’s face. Even before he asked her who the speaker was, he was certain from her expression what her answer would be. As it happened, she didn’t even wait for him to ask.
“That was Karen,” she said to him, sounding as if her throat was suddenly tight.
He nodded his thanks to her.
“Could I have that tape, please?” he asked Marisa. Not that he needed her permission to take possession of it, just as he hadn’t needed Nicky’s permission to take her phone, her second phone, which he’d carried with him off the beach and which was now, hopefully, tagged and bagged down at the station along with the first. The tape, like the phones, was evidence and could be seized, but he always tried to be polite when possible. In Jersey, it hadn’t always been possible, but down here in paradise, politeness tended to work like a charm.
As if to prove his point, Marisa nodded and pushed the tape recorder toward him.
“So what was that?” Livvy burst out, looking from Nicky to him and back.
“That call must have been the reason she went outside,” Nicky replied, with the exact amount of concern for secrecy that he had expected her to show. Her eyes were on him rather than her sister. “There was static on her phone. Somebody called her and she couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she went outside to see if she could get better reception.”
Conscious that secrecy was a lost cause, Joe nodded confirmation at her. That was what he thought, too. He’d have to check the timing against the videotape to be sure, but what he’d just listened to had to have been the start of one of the last calls Karen had received.
That, to him, held more significance than the whispering of a hundred ghost voices.
None of the callers he’d interviewed had said anything to him about Karen going outside because of static.
BY THE TIME Joe left, after extracting a firm promise from Nicky that she wouldn’t so much as step outside the house without one of his men by her side, it was after four A.M. and only the family remained. After a little more desultory conversation, everyone finally surrendered to exhaustion and went off to bed. Once there, Nicky snuggled beneath the covers and kept her eyes tightly closed and tried to focus on pleasant things—like the warm familiarity of her childhood bedroom, and the lulling roar of the waves coming in, and the knowledge that her family was all around her—so that she could fall asleep. But it didn’t work. Nothing did. The terrifying thoughts and images would not be denied. Against her closed lids, she kept seeing the slick red shine of Karen’s blood as the headlights hit it, and the lumpy, white-wrapped shape that was what remained of Marsha Browning as her body was taken away on a stretcher, and the glow of Nicky’s own computer screen.
Dogs howling in the dark of night. . . .
The doggerel scrolled through her mind. She did her best to push it out, seeking desperately for something—anything—that might hold at bay the icy fear that raced along her nerve endings. Joe’s face popped into her mind’s eye: She could almost see his eyes darkening with tenderness for her. She could feel his arms around her, taste his kiss . . .
Warmth began to take the place of ice. If she could just keep on thinking of Joe . . .
“Nicky?”
Coming out of the darkness as it did, the whisper made Nicky start. Her eyes flew open as she realized that the voice was one she knew. If she hadn’t been so jumpy, in fact, she would have recognized it instantly.
“Mama?” That was what both she and Livvy had called Leonora as they were growing up. Only after Nicky had left home for college had she switched to the more adult-sounding “Mother.” Livvy never had. Now that she was home again, Nicky found herself reverting back—in lots of ways, including how she thought of her mother. Under the circumstances, “Mama” just felt right.
“You weren’t asleep, were you.” It was a statement rather than a question. Leonora was standing in the open doorway, hardly visible at all, a denser shadow in the darkness. “Are you all right?”
Nicky turned over onto her back, pulled the covers up under her chin, and said to the shadowy ceiling, “I saw Tara Mitchell’s ghost today.”
Leonora didn’t reply for a moment. Then she made a sound, as of a sigh or a deeply indrawn breath, and moved into the room. Nicky could hear her slippers shuffling across the hardwood floor. She didn’t have to see her mother to know what she was wearing: her zip-up terry-cloth robe over a nightgown. Seconds later, as Leonora sat on the edge of the bed, Nicky felt the mattress sink beneath her weight and smelled the pleasant lotiony aroma of her mother at bedtime. Though she could see the dark shape that was Leonora out of the corner of her eye and feel the warmth of her nearness, Nicky continued to look at the ceiling. To her surprise, she could feel her heart pumping faster. To talk to her mother about seeing a ghost was not easy, she was discovering. It felt uncomfortable, almost as if she was impinging on forbidden territory.
“Where?” Leonora asked. Her voice was quiet, in keeping with the hush of the sleeping house, but entirely matter-of-fact. Of course. For Leonora James, seeing a ghost—or multiple ghosts—was just another day at the office.
&n
bsp; For Nicky, it was something else entirely.
Keeping her voice carefully even, Nicky told her mother about her experience.
“I’m not surprised,” Leonora said when Nicky had finished. “Or, rather, I’m surprised it took so long.”
“What?” Nicky’s eyes cut to her mother’s face, which she could now just barely—her eyes having adjusted to the gloom—discern. “What do you mean?”
“Have you really forgotten?” There was something in Leonora’s voice that made Nicky frown.
“Forgotten what?”
“I always wondered, you know. If you did it deliberately, or if it was some kind of involuntary defense mechanism. I finally decided that it was a defense mechanism.”
Nicky felt a cold niggle of apprehension and shivered. “What are you talking about?”
Leonora gave a rueful little chuckle.“Your father and I, we used to tease each other about how we’d produced two tiny clones. Olivia was—is—just like him. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed and so handsome and popular. A golden boy. Everybody loved Neal. Girls, boys, everybody. He was always, always the life of every party. You know what? I miss him still. He was my husband. These others—I guess I keep trying to replace what I had. But I’m finally realizing you only get to love like that once in a lifetime.”
Nicky rarely thought about her father, because remembering the laughing man whose favorite she had been hurt terribly even after the passing of so many years. But her mother’s words brought him sharply back, and for a moment, she had to grit her teeth against the pain.
“And you,” Leonora continued softly. “My precious little red-haired baby. You were my clone. Sometimes I think that’s why we’ve always sort of butted heads. From the moment you were born, I couldn’t believe how much alike we were. And not just in looks. You had this wonderful, wild imagination like mine, and a fiery, spunky disposition”—Leonora’s voice dropped to a near-whisper—“and, unlike Livvy, as a young child, you showed real signs of being psychic.”
“What?” Nicky’s hands clamped around the edges of the covers. Her eyes stayed fixed on her mother’s face. The words hit her like a shock of cold water. Whatever she had expected, it was not that. But deep inside, in some barely comprehended atavistic place in her soul, she knew that what her mother was saying was true, had been true.
“You repressed it,” Leonora said. “The gift. I’m positive you had it, but after your father died, you didn’t want it anymore. You refused, refused, to acknowledge that you could see anything, or feel anything, or know anything that was not of this corporeal world.”
Nicky sucked in air. The memories were rushing in, almost attacking her, agonizing memories of a smiling, blond-haired man standing at the helm of a twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser he named the Anticipation because all week while he worked as a banker he anticipated the weekend, which he would spend on his boat with his family. But on this particular weekend, both Nicky and Livvy had been recovering from strep throat, and they and Leonora had stayed home, leaving him to go out alone. He’d kissed them good-bye and gone. Nicky’s next vision of him had been on the deck of the boat, which was racing frantically toward shore as huge black clouds rolled across the sky toward it. The waves had picked up until the boat was being tossed around like a toy. There was a sharp crack as the hull smashed into rocks, and then the boat went down. She had seen it going under, seen the deck being swamped by torrents of cold, dark water. . . .
“Daddy.” Not even aware that she was doing it, Nicky reached for her mother’s hands, clutching them tightly, her eyes wide with horror. “I saw Daddy—”
Her voice broke, and she felt the sting of tears in her eyes.
“I know.” Leonora’s grip on her hands was firm and comforting. “I remember. The night your father died, before we knew anything was wrong, you woke up screaming. When I ran into your bedroom, you told me your daddy was drowned, and described everything that had happened, down to the color of the shirt he was wearing when he died. He’d changed after leaving home, you see, so you would have had no way of knowing. But you were right.”
“It was yellow,” Nicky breathed. Her throat ached, her heart pounded, and she felt a horrible, wrenching grief. It had happened so long ago—why did it still hurt so much?
“Yes.” Her mother’s hands tightened. “You didn’t speak for days. Then, when you finally began to recover a little, you were angry—with yourself, and especially with me. Oh, for a long time. Don’t you remember? It was as if you blamed yourself for not being able to do anything to save your father even though you saw what was happening, and blamed me for giving you the gift that allowed you to see it. And you would never, ever talk about what you’d seen that night again. You were so . . . closed to it that after a while I just let the whole thing slide, because it obviously disturbed you so much. From that day to this, as far as I know, you never had another psychic experience. I always wondered if the gift might resurface in you one day.”
“I don’t want it,” Nicky said with difficulty around the lump in her throat.
“Sometimes,” Leonora replied, “neither do I.”
There was so much sadness in her mother’s voice that even as she blinked back tears, Nicky sat up and hugged Leonora fiercely. Leonora hugged her back just as hard, and they stayed like that for a long time.
“SO, THIS is where we are,” Joe concluded his overview of the Marsha Browning investigation. He was standing in the police station’s grimy squad room in front of an oversized dry-erase board on which he’d scribbled a crude timeline of the crimes, starting with Tara Mitchell and ending with Marsha Browning. The fifteen-year gap he’d marked with a huge question mark, which he stressed that they needed to answer. His remarks were addressed to his assembled police force minus Randy Brown, who, having had a strong enough alibi to convince Joe that he couldn’t possibly be the killer, had been dispatched to babysit Nicky. It was Sunday evening, about six p.m., a time when ordinarily at least two-thirds of the force would have been off duty and he, personally, would have been kicking back with TV, some food, and maybe a brew. But under the circumstances, everybody was working basically around the clock, himself included. Given the small size of the force, the urgency of the situation, and Vince’s insistence that the whole thing be kept as quiet and contained as possible, this was the way things were going to stay for the foreseeable future—or until they caught their perp. At the moment, the guys were nodding as they scarfed down the last of the pizza that a local franchise had sent over gratis as a kind of morale booster, and Joe was getting ready to give out the next day’s assignments.
“Cohen and Locke, you’re still working that list of recent parolees within the target area, trying to find them, checking their alibis; Milton and Parker, you’re canvassing the neighborhood around the Old Taylor Place for any kind of word on suspicious persons who may have been in the area on either the eighth or the fourteenth; also, you are looking for a dog that might have been howling in that same vicinity on those same dates; Hefling and Roe, you’re going door-to-door around Marsha Browning’s house, asking about possible suspicious persons that may have been sighted within the last few days; Krakowski, you’re compiling a list of female residents of the island who live alone, which we need ASAP; O’Neil, you’re going over land- and cell-phone records for both victims; and the rest of you are taking care of anything else in the way of normal police work that may come up. Any questions?”
There were a few, and Joe answered them to the best of his ability. As they finished up, his troops pushed back their plastic chairs and went their separate ways. Some of them returned to their desks while others exited the building.
Joe was headed home. He had a few phone calls to make that needed to be placed in private. After that, he meant to grab a shower and then probably start cross-checking the information they had put together on the Marsha Browning murder with what they had on the Karen Wise case and then the old Tara Mitchell file. It wasn’t difficult work, but it was time-
consuming, and you had to know what you were looking for, which was why he was reserving that task for himself.
“So, you think we should warn our lady citizens who live alone to start locking their doors?” Milton asked, falling into step beside Joe as they walked out the back door. The last shimmers of daylight were fading away, and the fronds of the palmettos that surrounded the parking lot rustled in the quickening breeze. A couple cruisers were already pulling out of the lot, and the smell of their exhaust hung in the air.
“That would probably be a good idea.” As he headed toward his own car with Milton still keeping pace beside him, Joe tried to keep the dryness out of his voice, with indifferent success. In his opinion, any woman living alone who didn’t lock her door needed to have her head examined, but he knew that given the relaxed culture of the island, there would be some who needed reminding, even under the circumstances.
“And we should tell them that we’re going to be doing regular drive-bys just to check on them,” Milton said.
“Absolutely,” Joe replied, and lifted a hand in farewell to Milton as he headed away toward his own car.
“Chief Franconi.”
Hearing his name uttered in an unfamiliar near-shout, Joe glanced around sharply. There seemed to be at least three separate streams of people racing his way from the street in front of the building. A lightning survey identified a lone woman who was waving her hand at him while she yelled his name, a male-female team, and a male-male pair in which one of the men had a camera balanced on his shoulder.
Joe stopped and stared.
“Is it true that the Lazarus Killer claimed another victim last night?” Having outpaced the competition by a stride, the woman reached him first. She was carrying a tape recorder, but Joe didn’t need to see it, or hear her panted question, to realize what he was dealing with: the press. He started walking again, fast. Jesus Christ, how had word gotten out so fast?
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