“Our boy got himself a lawyer yesterday afternoon, who leaned on the prosecutor until she decided not to pursue the murder charge at this time.”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“I was afraid this might happen. I can’t blame her. The knives were circumstantial at best.”
“But now we have the DNA, right? So it’s back on.”
“Yes, but you have to understand—the drugs were just barely under the legal limit for trafficking. He’s only being charged with possession.”
“Please don’t tell me what I think you’re going to tell me.”
“He made bail yesterday. We don’t know where he is.”
In that moment it dawned on Parker that he was sitting in the middle of a deserted cemetery while the sky grew darker by the minute.
“Can’t you arrest him again? Can’t you put out an ABP thing?”
“We have an APB out on him now, but he’s not at home, and he hasn’t shown up on the grid yet. The good news is that his little army of delinquents has been bounced from the place. It was a condition of Damien’s bail that he have no contact with non-family members under the age of twenty. We’re camping out there. He shows up, we’ll grab him.”
Parker’s hands were shaking. “I know you told me to enjoy myself this weekend, but I’d really like to come back in to police headquarters.”
“That’s not a good idea. There’s another variable here, Parker. I can’t discuss it on the phone. What are you, about an hour from home?”
“About that, yeah.”
“I’ll meet you at your house. In the meantime, be careful. Lock your car doors, keep an eye on the rearview mirror, and for God’s sake, get out of the stupid cemetery.”
Parker hated ending the conversation. He knew having a policeman on the other end of a phone call did nothing to make him safer, but a false sense of security was better than none.
It was a bit of a hike back to his car, during which Parker got the rain he had been wishing for. The wind picked up, and every shadow, every groaning tree made Parker reel in horror, certain he’d see Damien and his henchmen descending.
He castigated himself. Why had he tagged along on the raid? He had only ensured that Damien would want revenge. He could have faded into the background. He could have taken the hint and backed off when the cat went up in flames. Now it was too late.
He finally reached his car, anxious to get inside and lock the doors, but also apprehensive, as the heavy rain and fogged-up windows made it impossible to see inside. He couldn’t stop thinking about the urban legend where the ax murderer lies down in the backseat of the car, waiting for his chance to behead the unsuspecting driver. Parker hung back and tried to squint through the rain and condensation.
Finally the fear of remaining in the open overwhelmed him, and he sprinted to the car, unlocked it, and threw himself into the front seat. He arched his back. No one lying down on the floorboards. No one crouched behind the passenger seat. So far, so good.
He brought the car to life and punched the gas. He longed to hear the tires squeal as he pulled away, but that would have required pavement. Instead they simply spun, slinging mud up in the air. In the distance he saw two headlights approaching. His pulse quickened.
He put the car in reverse and eased on the accelerator. A little movement. He quickly shifted back into drive and slowly pushed down the gas pedal. A bit more. The headlights were drawing closer. Back into reverse. Then drive. Reverse. Then drive.
The oncoming headlights were illuminating the inside of Parker’s car. He wished he had heeded Ketcham’s advice and gotten a gun, although he was sure he’d never have the nerve to fire it if he had.
The other car zipped by just as Parker cleared the mud and found traction on the gravel road. He would speed all the way home, he decided. And if he got pulled over, he would demand a police escort.
It was then he realized he hadn’t checked the trunk.
Parker had thought of the phrase “white knuckling” as a figure of speech until tonight. His palms were sweating, his ears finely tuned to any movement at all from behind.
The rear console of his car could flip down in the backseat, revealing a small door between the trunk and the car proper—a useful feature when transporting lumber, but terrifying at the moment. He wasn’t sure if the opening would accommodate a man, but he thought it more likely than not.
Ten minutes into the trip, he knew it wasn’t his imagination—something was moving back there. He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like someone was slamming a fist into the little door separating the trunk from the car proper. He remembered that it opened with the car door key, but it was a flimsy mechanism, and he guessed a well-placed kick would dislodge it. He considered bailing, fleeing the car on foot, but opted instead to accelerate more.
Just forty-two minutes after leaving the cemetery, Parker turned onto his street. The rain had quit and the sun was beginning to set. On any other night it would be breathtakingly beautiful, but Parker had bigger things on his mind. What if Ketcham wasn’t waiting for him, he wondered. After all, the detective wasn’t expecting him for almost another twenty minutes. If his options came down to staying in the car or going into his house alone, he wasn’t sure which he’d rather avoid.
As he neared home Parker saw that Ketcham’s car was not in the driveway. But the Jesuits’ Cadillac was. He could see a man sitting behind the wheel, probably Michael. Parker’s car screeched to a stop at the curb and Parker sprang out onto the wet pavement, slipping and sliding his way to Father Michael’s driver-side door.
He pounded on the window. “I think there’s someone in my trunk!” he practically yelled. “I can hear him.”
Michael emerged from the car, his hand bringing forth the bulky handgun from under his arm. “Do you have a remote for the trunk?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you just get going, like, ninety and pop it open?”
“I didn’t think of that.”
The priest positioned himself behind Parker’s car, securing a small flashlight under the muzzle of the gun. “Well, pop it open now.”
Parker pressed the release, and the trunk lid slowly opened about a foot. Michael yanked it the rest of the way and shined the light in. “Oh my,” he said. “I think I found your ‘perp.’ ” He reached into the trunk and pulled out a family-sized can of Massachusetts Bay clam chowder. “This must have been rolling around in there.”
“I’m sure I’ll feel stupid later. For now, you want to come inside and make sure there’s no one skulking around?”
“Right. Might be some oyster crackers waiting to jump out of the cupboard.”
Michael gave the house a quick sweep while Parker filled him in on the events of the previous day.
“She was more than your assistant, wasn’t she?” he asked as they entered the living room.
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The floor and coffee table were still covered with photographs of the church graffiti, and with very little prompting Michael was able to see the dingir in each.
“I was about to call you about that when I got word about Paige,” Parker said. “It’s looking like Damien really is the man we’re after.”
“That’s just it, Parker. I came here tonight to tell you he’s not.”
“Sorry?”
“I spoke with him last night. Guy’s an arrogant jerk, but he’s never killed anyone. Believe me. He’s never been possessed either. He likes to talk about it, but he knows he’s just talking.”
“Well, someone killed five people.”
“Yeah, someone did. But we don’t believe it was anyone in that house. Ignatius and I followed up with a couple of Damien’s flunkies this morning. They don’t know anything about the occult that they didn’t learn from bad TV and Jack Chick comics. The only main player we didn’t get to talk to was Raggedy Andy from the other night. He’s still in custody—apparently he took a swing at a cop.”
“Dylan Eiler,” Parker said. “He doesn’t strike me as a criminal mastermind either.”
“Agreed.”
“Did you hurt Damien?” Parker asked, hopeful.
“I didn’t lay a finger on him. I’ve never seen anyone flip so quickly. What a pansy.”
“Did you scare him?”
“You have to remember, Parker, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Let’s just say I’m afraid I may have reinforced some of his negative ideas about Christian clergy.”
Parker was having trouble swallowing this new development. “What about the DNA?”
“I don’t know. I suppose there are ways around that.”
“But what about the video footage? Why would he have gone to Melanie Candor’s candlelight service if he had nothing to do with it?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. We found that connection yesterday. They both spent time in the same foster home, overlapped by about a year. He was seventeen, she was fifteen. Seems they were still keeping in touch. In fact, she called Damien on his cell phone ten days before she died. It was his birthday.”
“But the police went through her cell records. How could they miss something like that?”
“Could all be in the timing. If they went through her phone bill with a fine-toothed comb before Damien was even a suspect, they might not bother to look at it again. Believe me, Parker, the guy’s not happening.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know about you, but it leaves us leaving. We can’t justify hanging around indefinitely. Father Ignatius has already flown back to Madrid to start the paperwork.”
“Ignatius is gone?”
“Yeah, he left this morning.”
“But you haven’t solved anything. You didn’t find the Crown. You didn’t catch the killer. What have you accomplished here?”
“I told you, Parker, this kind of thing usually goes unsolved. We don’t get many wins in this game.”
Parker thought of Isabella Escalanté, Melanie Candor, and Father Ignatius’s diamond-shaped throwing knife. Then he thought of Paige. Yet another lapsed Catholic was dead, and the militant priest with the medieval agenda was conveniently out of the country. Parker could only guess how much Ignatius hated the thought of a group of Protestant clergy keeping a sacred relic out of Holy Mother Church’s hands.
“We’d love to stay until we’ve got it all figured out,” Michael was saying, “but this whole thing has been one big web of dead-ends. We were all a little tentative about this investigation from the start, and there are cases on backlog with a lot more solid footing.”
“Are you leaving right away?”
“No, we have a few loose ends to tie up. There are a few churches I’d like to revisit, and I’ve got a list for Father Xavier to check out too.”
“Let me know when . . . you know . . .”
“Don’t worry. I won’t leave without saying good-bye.”
The living room was briefly illuminated by a swash of headlights as a car pulled in to the driveway.
“I better go,” Michael said. “Watch your back.”
“Yes, that’s comforting. Thank you.” He walked Father Michael to the door and followed him out, throwing the dead bolt behind him. Ketcham was lighting a cigar behind the wheel. Parker knocked on his window, which the detective had to manually crank down.
“Who’s that?” the detective asked, poking a thumb at Michael’s Cadillac disappearing down the street.
“Just a colleague offering his condolences about Paige. So where are we going? A safe house or something? Should I pack a bag?”
“No, you won’t need a bag. Get in.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on first?”
“Brynn Carter has been murdered,” he said solemnly. “You need to come with me.”
FIVE DAYS AGO
Danny was staring intently into the mirror, trying to get out of character before he went out hunting. He had stopped thinking of it as getting into character when he adopted a daytime persona not his own. Although he had just finished applying a good deal of black makeup around his eyes, there was no doubt that the true mask was the one he wore day after day, the only one most people knew.
He surveyed his reflection, letting Them boil behind his eyes. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression, they say, and Danny wanted to inspire terror, panic, and a sense of pure hopelessness tonight. He was working on his masterpiece, he had come to realize, but he had gotten off to a rocky start.
Tonight he would kill Isabella Escalanté. He would also, as it turned out, kill her boyfriend. He was prepared for this possibility, having studied them both, mapped out their building, and run through every conceivable contingency. The boyfriend had a gun, but so did Danny—a 9 mm Beretta, which he felt tugging slightly at his waistband on the small of his back. The gun was plan D, and in the end Danny would not need it. He never did.
He retrieved the black wig from a hatbox on his dresser and placed it carefully over his scalp, securing it in five different places. He let the long, wavy locks fall down in front of his eyes, completing the effect. Keeping his hair long had been essential to The Project, helping him tap into the fundamentalist assumption that the unkempt and uncouth were more likely to be in league with the Prince of Darkness. But regulations were regulations, and the police academy required a close-cropped, respectable look.
Back when he was hitting a church every weekend, Danny loved the way it felt walking into a sanctuary, his ratty bangs obscuring his eyes, waiting for someone to glance through the tangles and see Them inside. The gasps of good, churchgoing folks were delicious. He had taken this show on the road with him everywhere, frightening checkout clerks, meter maids, and children. He would tell them with his eyes that he owned them, and in that moment they would know that he was capable of doing horrific things.
But that was all before the academy, before the act, before Danny was called Officer, and then Detective, Daniel Paul Ketcham.
TWENTY-TWO
THE SIGN READ WALTER HILL JUNIOR HIGH.
Crawling with vines, the imposing Gothic revival would have been more at home on an Ivy League university campus than it was here in the inner city. The exterior was poorly lit with a smattering of mercury vapor lamps.
“What are we doing at a school?” Parker asked. He had said nothing during the fifteen-minute drive from his house, unable to process the news of Brynn’s murder for all the questions crowding his thoughts. What did this mean to the now-closed case against him? What had caused Damien to single him out in the first place? What was Parker to make of Father Michael’s latest visit? And why did he feel so incredibly unsafe right now, even with Detective Ketcham at his side?
“I need to show you something. Come on.” Ketcham parked at the main entrance, and Parker followed him uneasily up the crumbling concrete walk to the door.
“Is this place even used anymore?” he asked.
“No, it’s one of a growing number of abandoned schools. Sad really. They close the campuses in the worst neighborhoods first. Sure, they’ve got ways of justifying it, but we know it isn’t right, don’t we?” His voice changed just a bit, bringing a prickle of adrenaline up Parker’s spine. “Then again, maybe these folks just need to grab on to their destinies and start speaking reality.”
“Why do you have a key?”
“It’s city property. We use the gymnasium for storage.” He unlocked the door and motioned for Parker to enter.
Ketcham pulled a small LED flashlight from his pocket and led the way down a long, oppressively dark hallway lined with lockers. Parker stepped twice on the heel of the detective’s shoe, as he was trying to stay less than a step behind, feeling like he might be snatched at any moment and dragged off into some forgotten corner of the building. He suddenly remembered his cell phone and powered it on, holding the backlit screen up like a torch, to almost no effect.
“I’m still not sure why we’re here,” Parker said. �
��Is it a secret or something?”
“I told you. I have some evidence to show you. Now shut up and follow me. I shouldn’t even be doing this.”
“Can’t we turn on a light?”
“There’s no electricity, Parker. Can’t afford it. That’s the whole point.”
They descended a flight of stairs into the basement, and Parker tried to get even closer to Ketcham. The small arc from the flashlight was no comfort at all, as a combination of claustrophobia, nyctophobia, and a not-unfounded fear of demonized serial killers had Parker nearer than he’d ever been to a panic attack.
“It’s right in here,” Ketcham said. “Hold on, I’ve got a better light.”
A dappled orange radiance filled the corridor as Ketcham switched on a small battery-powered lantern. Parker’s eyes raced to adjust.
“This is the big breakthrough we’ve been looking for, Saint,” he said. Something was definitely different about the detective’s voice, giving Parker pause. “What do you think?”
Parker’s eyes—now in tune with the light—followed Ketcham’s thin finger as it slowly uncurled toward the far wall. There, badly beaten and duct-taped to a plastic classroom chair, was Damien Bane, his mouth taped shut and his eyes frozen wide in terror.
Parker looked back toward the stairs twice, wanting to indulge his initial impulse to flee, but the unrelenting darkness behind him made that impossible.
“What is he doing here?” he asked.
“He’s here to kill you. Don’t you get it?”
“No. No, he shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here.” Parker glanced at Damien, reading the unmistakable fear on his face. It was clear that he’d been worked over quite a bit, between his swollen right eye and the crisscrossing lines of dried blood emanating from his scalp.
“I thought you’d be grateful,” Ketcham said. “He killed your girlfriend. He stalked you, killed your accuser, and then he lured you here and finished you off.”
“Thank God you got to him in time.”
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