Ashes, Ashes

by Charles Atkins

  ‘Before his mother’s murder,’ Houssman commented, ‘Richard drew animals. I have sketchpads filled with them. Anyone seeing them assumes they were done by a skilled adult artist and not a three- or four-year-old. He drew the family cat and without being taught he’d switch styles from realism to cubism, to Japanese line drawing. I can only assume he’d seen examples on advertisements or maybe his parents took him to museums. Some you’d swear had been drawn by Picasso or Matisse. That all changed after his mother’s murder.’

  ‘That’s when he started drawing murder scenes?’ Hobbs asked, coming to an image that fueled his spiraling anxiety.

  ‘That’s Barrett,’ Felicia gasped, stating the obvious. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ The picture, drawn in rust-colored pencil, showed Barrett’s high cheekbones and almond eyes, but her complexion was marked with open pustules and oozing sores that dripped blood. The whites of her eyes were shot through with angry veins; her full lips were cracked and bleeding.‘What else is in there?’ Houssman asked quickly, wanting Hobbs to flip past the accursed drawing. What followed wasn’t much better: other faces, some they recognized, others they didn’t, all similarly pocked and diseased.

  Hobbs felt sick. His head spun and at first he didn’t recognize the buzzing of his cell. He flipped it open on the second ring. ‘Yes?’ his mouth felt parched. It was a buddy of his, Carl Briggs – a State Trooper.

  ‘Ed, you’re not going to like this.’

  Hobbs braced for the worst.

  ‘We found your lady friend’s cell smashed to bits in the woods outside the Titicus Reservoir … and we’ve got a homicide.’

  Hobbs could barely speak. ‘Is it her? Is it Barrett?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s her,’ Briggs said, ‘not from what you described. It’s a young, female Caucasian, long blonde hair – or at least she used to have. Our perp decided to play cowboys and Indians with her. Identification tag has her as a Lucinda Peters – state employee with some department I’ve never heard of.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Hobbs asked. ‘I’ll be there as fast as I can.’

  ‘Wouldn’t bother,’ Briggs added.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause I just got the call that we got homicide number two not ten minutes from here in Katonah. And Ed, whatever this guy’s up to it’s clear he wants publicity and he’s moving fast, ’cause both here and with the stiff in Katonah the first call he made was to the press. They beat the feds, and they beat us. It’s a fucking zoo! We’re all going to be TV stars.’

  ‘They have an ID on stiff number two?’ Hobbs asked, feeling a sick tingle in his fingers and toes.

  ‘Yeah, kind of a semi-celebrity, name of John J. Saunders. His wife’s the one who killed the kids a few years back.’

  ‘You got the address?’ Hobbs wrote it down. ‘Thanks, man.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Ed hung up, took a look back at the cardboard box of Glash’s belongings, and headed toward the door. Glash still had her; she was still alive; she had to be.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Houssman said, grabbing his hat and following Hobbs out into the corridor.

  ‘Are you insane?’ Hobbs replied, picking up his pace, not wanting to be saddled with the eighty-four-year-old psychiatrist.

  ‘Be reasonable,’ Houssman answered, catching up with him. ‘We’ve just scratched the surface on Glash. I have more to tell you and I can do it while you drive. And unlike Barrett, I know not to put myself in the line of fire. What was she thinking? She’s a fucking psychiatrist, for God’s sake! And did I hear correctly, that Glash killed Jane Saunders’ husband?’

  ‘What?’ Hobbs asked, slowing slightly. ‘What does she have to do with this?’

  ‘Quite a lot, I’m afraid,’ he said, pushing past Hobbs as the skirts of his long gray trenchcoat flew out around his ankles. ‘I’m definitely coming with you. We don’t have much time. Everyone I care about has been placed in mortal danger, so keep moving.’

  ‘You got it,’ Hobbs said. ‘So what’s the deal with John and Jane Saunders?’

  ‘Possibly our first break,’ Houssman said, not slowing. ‘Glash was one of four prisoners getting transferred, Jane Saunders, Dr Clarence Albert and Allison Tessavian are the other three … oh my God!’

  ‘What is it?’ Hobbs asked, finding himself having to step up his pace.

  ‘The pictures he drew of disease. Clarence Albert …’

  Before he could get out the words Hobbs made the connection. ‘He was the scientist who mailed anthrax. Oh, shit!’

  ‘Let’s just get there,’ Houssman said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know.’

  Eight

  Tall like his son, but skeletally thin, Peter Glash stooped through the low doorway as he left his still-warm BMW motorcycle locked in the squat shed garage. He walked across the trash-strewn alley to the four-story loft building on Lower Delancey that had been in the family since the turn of the century. Not given to emotions, he worried if all their planning had been for nothing. He pulled his cell out of the breast pocket of his leather jacket and stared at the LED screen. Even though it indicated there had been no calls, he pressed the back button just to check – nothing.

  At Croton, he’d seen the van that was supposed to be bringing Richard, but had been unable to glimpse anything through the small barred windows as he’d roared back to Manhattan, stopping every ten to fifteen minutes, just to check. Had he gotten away? Had he tried to call? The small round mirrors on his bike had told him nothing as he’d shot past the van – was Richard even inside? Perhaps there’d been a last-minute switch and it was one of the others – like Dr Albert.

  Peter didn’t want to dwell on all of the variables in his son’s plan. Too many ‘what ifs?’. What if Dr Clarence Albert was just a paranoid psychotic or a liar, and not a genius? The man wasn’t right in the head, thinking the government was filming his every move. What if everything he’d promised was just the fantasy of a madman? Or what if they’d delayed Richard’s transfer? Or discovered the pickup truck and the cell phones? What if they routinely scoured the parking lot for cars that weren’t supposed to be there? But the thought that tortured him, that had tortured him for decades, was What if Richard never gets out? He flipped open the cell again – let him call, please let him call. He stared at the screen, as though willing it to happen would make it so … nothing, just traffic noise and the sounds of cut-rate commerce on the other side of the wood and metal fence that hid the alley from Delancey.

  Peter unbolted the side door that led into the five-room apartment where he’d lived his entire life. His great-great-grandfather had bought the iron-fronted building with the money from years of street peddling. In the past, the two upper floors had been rented out to immigrant families – first the Irish, then the Jews – and then his grandfather had expanded his candy business, passed it on to Peter’s father and it had been going strong until the day Peter went to prison. Peter could still hear the school children cramming into the shop, their grimy hands clutching pennies, waving them over the counter. Him behind with his brothers, Frank and Edward, measuring out lengths of button candy, or counting licorice whips – two for a penny, five for two. He never liked those kids, never trusted them, always trying to steal, their little hands going where they shouldn’t. Even his own brothers couldn’t be trusted, although Frank at least had kept up the building during his ten years in Elmira. Then again, Frank owed him, and knew not to cross him.

  He walked through the dark but tidy kitchen and went into the gated and boarded-up store. Shafts of light pierced through the wood and the metal gates. Peter stared at the floor and pictured Richard – his son – as a toddler, curled up under the counter with the tabby cat. His pudgy hands always working on another picture … always drawing. He was a beautiful child with piercing blue eyes and jet-black hair, just like his mother – the harlot. The smallest thought of her, brought from Romania at great cost … his hands balled at his sides – ‘Harlot! Whore!’ The words san
k into the walls. It was all her fault – Dorothea’s, the whore.

  The cell rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes, Richard.’ Hope surged.

  ‘Thank you, Father.’

  ‘You’re welcome, son.’ Peter could barely breathe. So many questions he wanted to ask. But all he could think was that Richard was free, he was finally free.

  ‘I have two hostages. I will give you their information now. Do you need to get a pencil and piece of paper?’

  ‘No, son … go ahead.’

  ‘The first is a little famous; her name is Dr Barrett Conyors. She’s five foot eleven inches, she has short dark brown hair and blue-gray eyes – although that won’t matter.’ He continued with a detailed account of everything Barrett was wearing. ‘You’ll need more accurate information and I will get it for you.’ He then described Carla Phelps. ‘I’m going to be on TV,’ Richard said after finishing relaying his hostages’ statistics and clothing.

  ‘Yes, son.’

  ‘I’m going to be very famous.’

  ‘Yes,’ Peter agreed, the phone pressed tight to his ear. He felt an unknown emotion, like a pressure filling his chest.

  ‘I have to go now … Dad. I’ll call soon.’

  ‘Yes, son … and Richard?’

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘I’m very proud of you. Please be careful.’

  ‘I will.’

  And they hung up.

  Nine

  In the back of a Chrysler van with her hands in APC restraints and her legs duct-taped together, Barrett strained to stay upright and keep from being further injured as Glash drove away from the Saunders’ house. What she’d been forced to witness was seared into her brain, Glash the connoisseur of murder. Every detail was a perfect recreation of Jane’s murder spree, only instead of her young children, Glash had slit the throat of her husband, a man who’d been making a living out of his wife’s tragedy. She could still picture his face plastered on the back of the glossy book jackets that spilled from boxes piled in his living room. She’d read somewhere that he’d gotten a million dollar advance for Whatever Happened to Grown-Up Jane?, a book that portrayed him as the victim of a wife whose mental illness had spiraled out of control. What he’d neglected to tell was how he had systematically ignored the advice of all the psychiatrists and doctors who had treated Jane.

  She choked back a wave of bile as she pictured John J. Saunders pleading for his life. She could have told him it would do no good. Seconds later his throat was slashed from ear to ear, like a gaping second mouth. Glash had then dipped his forefinger into the rushing blood and painted the walls of the living room with apocalyptic verses: ‘And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see’. As horrific as it was, Barrett, who’d spent hours examining the photos of Jane’s crime, knew that Glash had done his homework. The walls had once again dripped blood in the Saunders’ home; same words in the exact same places. A wall for each of the horsemen, Glash had worked fast, dragging Saunders’ corpse like a fleshy inkwell, not stopping until he’d penned the final verse: ‘And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death and with the beasts of the earth’. She wondered what the crime-scene team would find when they did their luminescence tests. No matter how much fresh paint had been slopped on those walls, the old blood would still light up. She could almost see their expressions of disbelief; Glash’s efforts would be within millimeters of the original.

  She pressed her back against the side of the van – their new vehicle. Glash had abandoned the pickup in Saunders’ garage and taken his Town & Country minivan. Ironically, the seats had been removed and the back loaded with more boxes of his book, as though he’d been stopping at home in the midst of a publicity tour. She strained to hear what was happening up front. She heard Carla’s voice: ‘Richard, it’s not too late.’

  Glash said nothing.

  ‘I know how you must feel,’ Carla continued. ‘I’ve been through this too, different, but not that different.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I have a young daughter,’ Carla said. ‘Her name is April and because of Dr Conyors, and other doctors like her, she was taken from me because I was in a psychiatric hospital.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ His voice was a monotone.

  ‘They said I have bipolar disorder.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then they were right to take away your daughter.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Carla asked.

  ‘Some say Jane Saunders has bipolar disorder; she killed her children. I killed her husband. I don’t have bipolar disorder. I shouldn’t have been locked up.’

  Barrett angled her legs and pressed back so she could glimpse Glash and Carla. She shuddered as she caught a blue eye staring at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘He was famous,’ Glash said.

  Barrett realized he was talking to her. ‘Who was famous?’

  ‘John J. Saunders, he wrote a book and was on television. That makes him famous.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘He’ll be more famous now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Barrett said, puzzling at where this was going, and thinking it had something to do with his insistence on her watching him murder Saunders and poor Lucinda Peters. ‘You’re famous,’ she said, trying to test a hypothesis.

  ‘Not very, but I will be,’ he answered. ‘Now shut up, both of you.’

  Barrett lost track of time as Glash drove – it seemed like hours. At one point he pulled off the road and carried Carla back and dumped her next to Barrett. He then threw a blue plastic tarp over them. Minutes later he drove into a gas station and filled the tank. Before leaving the vehicle he spoke. ‘If either one of you tries to escape or makes a sound I’ll kill everyone here and set fire to the pumps. I like fire. It’s pretty.’ He didn’t wait for a response.

  Barrett glared at Carla in the dim light that filtered through the blue plastic. She was furious. ‘This is your fault,’ she whispered. ‘People are dying because of you.’

  Carla looked at Barrett, their faces uncomfortably close. ‘It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? Go around judging everyone,’ her voice was a hissing whisper, ‘playing God, deciding who gets locked up, who can be a fit mother. It must be quite the burden, Dr Conyors, to be so important.’

  ‘What happened to you wasn’t my fault,’ Barrett said, knowing that like it or not her fate was tied to Carla’s.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Carla replied sarcastically, ‘it must have been someone else telling the judge that I was gravely disabled and should have only supervised contact with my child.’

  ‘That was only meant for while you were still manic and delusional.’

  ‘And who decides that? Am I manic now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just checking,’ Carla said. ‘Seeing as we’re both probably going to die,’ she continued, ‘I always wondered if you had something going on with my husband. You do remember Bill? Tall, handsome, supposed to be with me till death do us part. He always made a point of saying how “attractive” he found you. Were you fucking him?’

  ‘Get real,’ Barrett said. ‘Any other questions?’

  The two women, both bruised and similarly restrained, glared at each other inside their blue plastic tent. A moment of realization passed between them.

  ‘We are so screwed,’ Carla said, her anger replaced by surging fear.

  ‘I know, and we can’t fight like this,’ Barrett said.

  ‘You’re right. It’s just I’ve hated you for so long … Truce. What does he want?’ Carla asked, the anger gone from her voice. ‘It can’t be just killing for killing’s sake. Otherwise we’d both be dead … wouldn’t we?’

  ‘That’
s what I’m trying to figure out,’ Barrett whispered. ‘His fascination is murder, but there’s more to it. Why is he leaving cell phones with the bodies and why is he making me watch?’

  ‘He wants to be famous,’ Carla said, and quickly shut up as Glash opened the passenger door.

  They stayed silent as he drove. The daylight that illuminated their makeshift tent faded, and eventually they were in total darkness.

  The vehicle lurched to the right and left the highway for a secondary road. Minutes later the wheels began to bump over an unpaved surface. Barrett heard gravel ping against the undercarriage; pressure grew in her ears as they gained altitude. Then they came to a stop.

  The two women tensed. It felt too quiet. They huddled motionless, not daring to move.

  The rear doors opened and Glash ripped off the tarp. He was carrying a shovel.

  ‘Please God, no!’ Carla whimpered, seeing the shovel and assuming the worst.

  Glash looked at Barrett. ‘Do you know where we are?’

  Barrett shivered in the cool night air, her eyes, now accustomed to the dark, took in the strange scene, a deserted wood-framed cabin in the middle of a pine forest. A crescent moon shone a silver light down on the clearing. Glash rested the shovel against the side of the vehicle and grabbed Barrett by her restrained legs and roughly sat her up in the space between the open van doors.

  At first she was about to say ‘no’, but something about the mountain setting was familiar. They’d been to the Saunders’ home, and so thinking through the other two – Allison and Dr Albert – she said, ‘This is Dr Albert’s cabin.’

  ‘Yes. Good. What did he do here?’

  ‘He manufactured anthrax spores,’ Barrett replied, feeling like this was a test where she’d better come up with the right answers.

  ‘Yes. Good.’ Abruptly, he picked up the shovel and walked toward the cabin. Then he turned right and vanished into the woods.