There were three bedrooms. We split up to look them over. All had beds still in place. One of the beds had been stripped long ago, and lacked its mattress. A wooden chair stood near the middle of this room, and a lampshade lay on the floor. There were some leaves and bits of glass lying around.
When I came back out into the upper hallway Monroe was still in one of the other rooms. I checked the bathroom, which was as quiet and faded as everywhere else. I stepped back out and was just beginning to relax a little when I thought I heard something.
It was coming from one of the rooms I'd already been in. The one with the chair.
A sniff, or soft ripping sound?
I straightened my arms, bringing the gun up a little higher. Walked very quietly back to the bedroom at front right. Stood outside the door a moment.
And saw a small shadow slide across the wall inside.
Monroe came out of the main bedroom. I quickly held up a hand, first finger straight. He stopped in his tracks. I indicated the room. He gave a single upwards nod of his head.
I took a step in, gun pointed down the far end. Turned quickly back to sweep across the long wall. Went back. Took another step. Dropped to one knee to stare uncertainly under the bed, the one which had been left without a mattress. There was nobody in the room.
I turned to see Monroe standing at the door. 'Did you hear anything?'
'Nothing,' he said. 'What was it?'
I shook my head. 'Nothing, I guess. Never mind.'
I let out a long overdue breath. The whole house seemed to exhale around me.
We walked back down the stairs. Took another look around the rooms there and wound up back in the kitchen.
'I think we've drawn a blank, Ward.'
'It's still the van I saw,' I said. 'The fact nobody's home doesn't change that.'
'It doesn't make it into anything we can use, either. We…'
He stopped talking, looking over my shoulder. I turned to see an unobtrusive door set into the back wall.
'Cupboard?'
'Don't think so,' he said, his voice low again. 'It's under the central stairwell.'
I reached out and pulled the door. It opened onto blackness. Cool air floated up towards us. I put my hand through the opening and felt around for a light switch. Found one. Flipped it.
Wooden stairs led to a cellar.
We walked down. The basement was a large, rectangular space and it was empty. I was about to turn straight around and head back up, but Monroe stopped me.
'Wait,' he said. 'Look at the floor.'
The harsh light from the single hanging bulb made it obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. The dirt and dust on the floor was not evenly distributed, but scuffed up in a series of large and irregular swirls. Kind of like what might happen if someone had recently moved around over it, someone whose movements were constricted. Something made me drop to one knee and put my hand gently in amongst it. Stare down at it, and listen.
Monroe had moved to a further portion of the floor and was doing something similar.
'Okay,' he said, his voice tight. 'I think we might have found something here.'
I looked up reluctantly. 'What?'
'Blood smear, faint. Someone did a decent job of trying to clear it up. But there's staining evidence of volatile fatty acids too. As if a body lay here for a while.'
'Alive or dead?'
'Immediately after death,' he said. 'Okay. We might have found where Gulicks stored her first victim before she took off the flesh.'
'You think this disturbed dirt came from him?'
I didn't want him to say yes, and he knew it.
'I don't know, Ward. But it probably is. This place is maybe to do with Gulicks. There's nothing concrete to put Nina here.'
'But the van moved here after she was in custody.'
He thought. 'True. Let's go take a look at it.'
He trotted up the stairs. I waited a moment and looked down once again on the swirls in the dust. Had Nina made them? Shouldn't you be able to feel the presence of someone you loved, even if they weren't there any longer? Shouldn't that be what your senses were for? I tried, but I couldn't tell. I could feel something in this house, but I couldn't tell if it was an echo of her.
I started towards the stairs but on impulse reached up and knocked the dangling bulb with my hand, just to provoke a change in the light. The bulb swung irregularly back and forth, throwing its glare into different corners. It made the staining Monroe had noticed a little more obvious—and forced me to wonder if it had been a man's body after all, or more recent, and a woman's.
And something glinted up close to the far wall.
I stepped quickly over to it, through thick and dodging shadows. I squatted down and felt around with my hands. My fingers brushed over something sharp. I grabbed it.
It was a bracelet. Cheap, plated silver ringlets, mottled pieces of indifferent turquoise. The chain was broken, as if it had caught against something and snapped.
But it was not tarnished, which said it had not lain here for years. And it looked a lot like something I remembered Nina picking up for six dollars in a small town we passed through when we took one of our vague road trips east from Sheffer.
I wasn't sure. Nowhere near. But suddenly the shapes in the dust looked like somebody I recognized.
I ran up the stairs. I knew this probably wasn't going to be enough for Monroe. But for the first time in two days, I felt I'd been close to her.
I made it out onto the porch and then stopped in my tracks. There was something in the yard. Something large, lying half-hidden in the long grass.
My gun was back in my hand. I moved sideways along the porch, trying to get a better angle to see what the thing was. Glanced across at the van. Called out softly:
'Charles? Where are you?'
Nothing but the wind moving the leaves at the very tops of the trees. I quickly swung from far left to far right. Nothing to see there either.
I stepped carefully down off the porch and walked towards the shape lying on the ground. I kept my gun on it until I recognized the colour of the suit.
Monroe was lying face down. He was not moving. The grass around him was flecked red, as if with tiny wild flowers.
I pulled him quickly over onto his back. There was blood everywhere. There were deep, straight channels hacked into his forehead and face and neck, revealing meat and chipped bone. A tooth glinted through a hole in his cheek, clean, polished.
His jaw sagged slowly to the side, releasing a dark clot of something from inside, and his last breath shaped a word.
Sorry.
I said his name but his eyes were already flat, and not even looking in the same directions.
I knelt, staring down at him, not knowing what to do or who had done this. I reached for the pulse in his neck but it was beating in some other place now. He had gone. The person called Charles Monroe wasn't there any more, just a thing that looked very like him, a dead thing adrift and a thousand miles from home.
I heard the swishing of long grass. Loud.
I looked up—
A man was running at me from the left side of the house. A big man, with a huge knife in his hand.
I swivelled my arms up and right and fired before I really took in what was coming at me.
The bullet hit him in the shoulder. I shoved myself backward, barely making it up to my feet.
The man tried to keep coming, and almost had the momentum to make it far enough to strike. I kept backing up and shot him in the thigh, and he swivelled and fell and slid.
I didn't give him a chance to get up but ran over and stomped on his hand until it no longer held the knife. Picked it up and threw it as far as I could into the long grass.
I stood back out of arm's length and pointed the gun at the man's face. His hair was grey. His hands and face were spattered with Monroe's blood and his own.
'Tell me who you are,' I said. 'And tell me where she is.'
He stared up at me, a
s if confounded. 'It's you,' he said. 'It's always you.'
'You don't know me.'
'It was always you.'
'I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm not…'
'Just get it over with. Please, please get it done.'
'Oh, I'll kill you. Count on that.'
I stepped onto his chest and pressed the gun against his forehead with all of my weight. 'But you have tell me first.'
•••
He was a man called Jim Westlake. He was a man called James Kyle. He/they had lived here and he/they had killed eighteen women over twenty years, ending with his wife, who had lain in the woods fifteen minutes' walk from here, until John and I found her. Things had come to a point. Did I understand? Things had just come to a point. He had not realized back then that people had known about him for a long time, people who were not the police but who understood why women in Owensville and Rackham and further afield occasionally disappeared. They even knew where he had buried them, and they approved. Someone he called the Forward-Thinking Boy had come on the worst night, the last of that old life, the night when he was alone in his house with no wife any more and a child who ran to hide from him because she had realized he was all wrong, who ran up to her bedroom and crawled underneath her own bed as if he was a storm come to get her. He had buried his wife only two nights before and he knew he was lost and everything had unravelled and come to a point: as he placed Laurie in the ground he had looked up and in the moonlight he thought he saw a pool of dark blood hovering four feet in the air on the other side of the island. Blood, like the blood he had taken from them all, the blood of his angel women, the blood he had taken inside himself. You can't eat a hand, it's too bony, but you can eat blood and find it good. He chased the apparition but it was gone, running away through the woods. So he finished his business, but what do you do then? It is inexorable. One leads to two and finally to many. Maybe if it had not been for this town he would have been okay, and Karla would have been the one, long-ago Karla, back when everything happened for the first time. But if the land wants you to renew its power you have no option but to comply, and when your beloved discovers your secret one night there can only be one conclusion to the situation, and then you are trapped in the burning shell of a life with your own little girl terrified of you…
'I don't understand,' he said, racked with shivers as shock began to set in. His face was pale, slicked with cold sweat, contorted with whatever it was he could not comprehend. 'I told her about the storms. I made her feel better. I loved her. But I still did what I did. I just don't understand.'
'What happened then?'
'When?'
'After you'd killed whoever it is you're talking about.'
'You came along.'
'I'm not…okay. What did I do?'
'We buried her close and you helped me clean everything up and move and you used contacts to make it all fade away. You made me kill people for you and then you stopped asking and I heard nothing for years and years. I didn't kill. I took pictures. I was like everyone else. I thought you had gone for ever. For every year that passed I tried to imagine one angel subtracted away. I thought maybe I could get back to none. But you never go. You're always there. You're always fucking here.'
'It's not me. It's someone else.'
'It's you. You look different, but it's you. It's always you.'
'Why did you come back here?'
'You made me come. I was supposed to deal with the girl who saw me back then, who had started killing in my way. But she had already been arrested. And…you wanted me to do other things for you.'
'You killed the cop at the Holiday Inn.'
'Yes.'
'You abducted Nina, the FBI agent. Brought her here.'
'For a few hours, but then we drove. We could have driven for ever. No one would ever have found us. I wasn't going to…Then you came, and I had to come back here to my house. You made me.'
'Who?'
'You.'
'It's not me' I stared at him. 'Wait—came here? To Dryford? When?'
'This morning.'
'Paul came here this morning? By himself?'
The man stared at me, and finally seemed to get I was not the person he'd been talking about. 'In a car with some kid,' he said. 'They don't know what he's really like. They don't understand he's not even real.'
'Where is he now?'
'I don't know. He went.'
'When?'
'Two hours ago.'
'Does he have Nina with him?'
Jim/James suddenly tried to pull himself upright, catching me off guard. I kicked him back down again.
'Tell me or I swear to God…'
'He's got her.'
'She's alive?'
'She was when they left.'
I pressed the gun harder into the head of someone not much younger than my father had been when he died. 'Where are they? Where did they go?'
'I don't know.'
'What kind of car?'
'Big. Black.'
I tightened my finger on the trigger but I looked in his eyes and saw there was nothing in there worth killing.
Instead I left him crawling into the long grass and went quickly back to Monroe. I was going to close his eyes but then realized there are worse things to look at forever than branches waving gently across a cold blue sky.
Then I turned and ran back to the car.
Chapter 33
Lee was getting pissed off. Lee was getting confused. Lee was beginning to feel that none of this was making much sense.
They'd put the woman in the back of the car and Paul had got in with her. The windows were tinted. Nobody could see who was in there. Paul told Lee to sit up front with the driver. This guy was short and had heavy brows and a hook nose and was basically the kind of person Hudek usually went to some trouble to avoid. The flat smile he gave Lee when he got in the car said he felt much the same way about him.
They drove back through the woods to the bigger town and cruised around. Occasionally Paul's phone would beep: he looked at the screen but didn't answer. Once in a while Paul would ask for something. The car would stop, and Lee would go get it. The driver came with him and stood just outside the door each time. Presumably this was in case Lee decided to run off, and the precaution made him mad. He wasn't going anywhere. He just wanted to be told what was under way, and what this job he was supposed to do was. They went to the Starbucks and Lee withstood the usual wait to bring back coffees. They went to the grocery market and Lee was sent in for cigarettes. Lee was told to go take a digital photograph of the inside of the church, and the outside of the police station, both of which he did. He went and bought batteries from the Radio Shack in the strip mall on the edge of town, and onion rings for the driver from the Renee's up the road. At each of these places the people were friendly to him. They smiled and nodded and wished him good day like they were in some advert for small-town living. None of this dissuaded Lee one iota from his view that the place was utterly lame.
Finally they headed back into the centre and the car pulled up outside a long run of iron railings with an ornate gate in the middle. On the other side was an open patch of tended grass leading up to the school. Kids of various ages were milling around in front of it, stretching a few extra minutes of freedom out of lunch break. On the opposite side of the road was a smaller building in the same style. A super-friendly sign said this was a kindergarten.
Paul told Lee to come have a seat in the back. Lee got out, came around, climbed in. The woman was sitting where she'd been put, tied hand and foot. Lee looked her in the eyes for a moment and thought that for someone in her position, she seemed remarkably unafraid.
'You going to make me kill her?'
Paul look at him, eyebrows raised. 'Why would you think that?'
'Like a blooding thing, or something.'
'That's not what I had in mind. Hand to hand I'd bet evens, anyway. At best.'
'So—what?'
Paul reached be
neath the seat and pulled out a small black bag. Looked like the kind of thing you might tote an iPod around in, or a CD player. He handed it to Lee. Inside were four small jars of pills.
'What's this?' Lee said. He looked out the window at the school. 'You want me to go sell drugs?'
'No. I want you to give them away.'
Lee was about to tell the guy he didn't have to be sarcastic but then realized he wasn't joking. 'Why?'
'Priming the pump.'
'That's the big job you've got lined up for me?'
'Just a warm-up, Lee. I'll be back in an hour, and then we'll get to the main lesson for today.'
Lee got out and watched as the car drove away.
He knew he would do what he'd been asked—told—to do, but the situation was really beginning to try his patience. This didn't seem like enough for someone who'd been through what he had, who'd had his life cut out from under him. He was a guy who wanted to make his mark. Up until a week ago he'd been going in the right direction, heading along a good, straight track of his own devising. He had a crew. He had friends. He had a life. He had a plan.
He was the one who drove.
For a moment he hesitated right there on the sidewalk, and realized how much he missed Brad. Sleepy Pete, too, a couple others, but mainly Brad—even though his ribs still ached from their fight. They had been friends a long time, and Lee never had too many friends. Brad had a way of saying things, subtly and offhand, that Lee had eventually taken on board. He had sort of understood that this process took place, but never as acutely as he did now. He wished Brad was here to say 'Shit on this, man, it sucks,' or 'Okay, it's weird but let's get busy.' Or that he could hear Pete droning on about the hidden rooms in some game or other, or even see Karen passing by on the other side of the street. He wished he'd made more of an effort after that one time they slept together. He had felt awkward afterwards, emotionally exposed in a way he was unaccustomed to. Natural response—don't call. He hadn't even realized he'd like to see her again until it was too late and she'd moved on to Brad, and Lee's dad had always been one for saying you can't go home again.
Blood of Angels Page 33