Thirty minutes later they heard someone approaching, boots grinding on the front steps of the bus. Sykes appeared in the murky light, head dripping wet, hand scratching furiously at the back of his neck.
He started for the lantern next to the mattress, staggered some, and then knelt. A look of concern crossed his face. Where was the paring knife? He looked at Marcia Schmidt on the mattress, still handcuffed to the rod above her head; no way could she have reached the knife. He looked back over his shoulder at the policewoman; it had to be her. The other one was blind.
He drew his pistol from his belt, walked back to the policewoman, and shoved the gun under her chin, grabbing her arm with his free hand, jerking it high in the light where he could see the tape. The wrists were still bound.
He pushed her aside and grabbed Sherry by the wrists, checked the tape, and pulled her away from the wall to look behind her.
Nothing.
He shoved her back.
Cautiously he returned to the lantern, keeping the gun pointed at O’Shaughnessy, patting the floor behind him and around the lantern; he smiled as his hand came to the knife at last.
Fucking nerves were getting to him. It had been there all along.
“Kneel in front of her.” He came back to O’Shaughnessy and kicked her in the side. “Do it now, bitch.”
She pivoted so her back was to him.
“Undress her. Use your fingers and be quick about it.” He coughed a deep, racking cough that pulled something up from his lungs.
She hesitated.
“Five more minutes and this cunt on the mattress goes into the hole.” He pointed the gun toward Marcia.
O’Shaughnessy leaned toward Sherry, undoing the last button on her shirt, pulling it off her shoulders until it fell and draped around her waist. “Now her shorts; open her shorts.” He came closer, leaned over O’Shaughnessy’s shoulder, and put his lips against her ear. “You like that, don’t you? You want some of that yourself, don’t you, Lieutenant?”
His laugh reverberated around the metal walls of the bus. O’Shaughnessy’s knees scraped the bare metal floor as his thighs pushed against her back, his fetid breath on her neck. “You’ll get your chance. You’ll both get your chance, and soon.”
O’Shaughnessy waited, taking her time with Sherry’s shorts. Sykes squeezed the tops of her shoulders, leaned down, and licked her neck; she could smell sickness on his breath. He laughed quietly. “You know, you were even easier than I thought.”
“Now!”
O’Shaughnessy ducked as Sherry snap-kicked, tape flapping from her unfettered ankle as the heel of her foot shattered his nose. O’Shaughnessy spun, ramming him with her elbow, knowing that if he didn’t go down, she would need to plant her heels into the floor and push him into the hole with her back. Most likely falling in with him. But he toppled and Sherry leaped forward and gave him a two-fisted shove that pushed him over the edge.
Sykes’s own weight worked against him; he tried but failed to keep from rocking backward on his heels. His feet went out from under him as he went over the edge. Clawing for anything to grab hold of in that last possible second, he snagged the tape around Sherry’s wrists. And took her down with him.
O’Shaughnessy leaped to grab Sherry’s legs, catching them at the ankles just before she disappeared. They all froze as the human chain snapped to a stop. Everyone holding a breath to see if the chain would hold.
Then Sykes started to swing his legs, trying to catch a toehold on the side of the pit.
“I die, you die,” he panted up at Sherry.
Thunder cracked and the bus shook. It was a deafening explosion with a blaze of white light. Shadows seemed to move around them; silhouettes came and went like ghostly apparitions.
O’Shaughnessy looked down and could see the top of Sykes’s head, illuminated by the ceiling’s reflection of the lantern.
Jeremy wasn’t actually aware that his legs were transferring weight or that his disjointed footfalls had started to reconcile. He didn’t know that he was running as he passed between the seats or that his hand was gauging weight or that his elbow was setting or that his torso was twisting for power as he lunged over the hole and thrust the paper spear at the man who was hurting the women.
Sykes heard the footfalls only a second before Jeremy appeared, reached up to block the attack, and swiped to grab the pole with his right hand. But without the use of his thumb, the spear slid easily through his glove and buried its steel tip in the scar that creased his throat.
Sykes looked up at the disheveled man in astonishment. Then blood began to pump from the hole around the spear. He hung there a minute longer, dark stains spreading across the shoulders of his T-shirt, and then his body began to convulse.
Sherry could feel his grip on her wrists weakening as his head tilted forward. And in the final seconds between the time Sykes’s hand went limp and his body plunged into darkness, a collage of screaming faces exploded in front of her.
She was seeing his victims fall.
35
SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 1:00 A.M.
BLACKSWAMP
Blackswamp had become a city of strobes; every available emergency vehicle in the county was called to the scene. Gus Meyers and his crime-scene technicians set up a command post near the bus. Police alerted the FBI, the state police, and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Men and women were donning protective suits and bringing cameras on cables and crates of detection equipment to the bus.
O’Shaughnessy’s lips were dark in the bright glare of the emergency room lights. She was missing one of her shoes. There was a heavy bloodstain on her blouse and dried blood in her hair. The backs of her arms were black and bleeding; her lip had been cut, and there was a mass of green and black swelling on the side of her face. “Tim,” O’Shaughnessy whispered.
“It’s me, Lieu. It’s Mac.”
“Call him, Mac. Call him for me.” Her words were so faint he had to put his ear to her lips.
“I’ll call him right now, Lieu. You’re going to be just fine.”
McGuire took the radio and stepped away from the gurney, placed a call to the office, and directed one of the detectives to find O’Shaughnessy’s husband and bring him to the hospital.
Marcia Schmidt was badly dehydrated and suffering internal injuries; she had been wrapped in blankets and flown to the university hospital in Vineland.
Sherry Moore was in the cubicle next to O’Shaughnessy, both eyes black and nose bound in tape.
Jeremy Smyles sat in the back of a police car staring at the puddles forming in the swamp. His face looked oddly serene, his arms unusually still.
Chief Loudon stood at the gates of Blackswamp. The air was fetid with the smell of decay. He took the sketch out of his pocket and unfolded it. Sherry Moore had described him perfectly. Earl Oberlein Sykes. Just as he had looked thirty years before.
Loudon balled up the paper and threw it away.
Postscript
Life went on that year. Sykes managed to get his picture in the papers one more time, a headliner for several weeks until the public tired of reading about him.
The pit regurgitated its own tragedies, reminding the world of a time when men knew as little about the things they were putting in the earth as they knew about men themselves. A time of innocence when words like carcinogen and serial killer were yet unknown.
From a morass as black as its name, they sifted its bones and belt buckles and keys and teeth, one by one transforming them into names: Venable, Ashley, Sharp, Able, Sanderson, Rutledge…
O’Shaughnessy returned to her position as commander of the city’s detective unit. She was studying nights for the captain’s exam, and Tim surprised her with a return trip to Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate a new beginning.
Dillon didn’t lose his job, but he did lose his sergeant’s stripes. It was Corporal Dillon now, and he preferred the night shift where there were fewer officials to order him around.
Nicky Schmidt was c
onvicted of interstate theft and sentenced to seven years in Lewisburg Penitentiary, where Sykes had started out thirty years before.
Marcia Lamb, who dropped the name Schmidt, filed for divorce and moved to Wildwood, where she manages a small hotel.
John Payne was commended posthumously. The shot that disabled Sykes’s hand in the second before Payne died helped to save the lives of three women.
And Jeremy Smyles has a medal from the city hanging over his new dresser. It’s the first thing he sees each morning when he rises to go to work.
Dear, dear John. What would you have thought if I told you that night in the funeral home I saw Susan Paxton as a young woman putting a big, red fisherman’s sweater on a little girl like me? Or that she watched the little girl climb an icy set of stairs toward an angel; I never knew that a statue of an angel looked down on the landing where I was found.
Susan was with me that day, the one in my nightmares when I saw my mother’s face on the windshield. Susan was supposed to guard me until Sykes returned.
They identified her, you know, my mother—her name was Melissa Rutledge. I still dream of her, but it’s a different dream these days. I see more of her than I used to. I see her face more clearly than before. Not the terrorized woman on the windshield; she is standing on the side of the road, one arm hooked around a bag of groceries, the other around my shoulders. She looks down at me, smiling and beautiful, and when a van appears on the horizon she raises her eyebrows and makes a silly face, and then puts her thumb out toward the road.
Sherry sighed and reached for an object on the sofa next to her, picking it up.
And what would you have thought if I’d told you that I loved you, John? That I always loved you.
A chunk of ice fell from a gutter and landed dully outside her window. Sherry pressed the gold badge between the palms of her hands, just as Angie Payne had pressed it into her hand at the cemetery after the funeral; Angie had told her everything that day.
The hardest part of my life was keeping my feelings from you, even when I suspected what you were thinking.
She sniffled, reached for a tissue, and covered her mouth with it.
I blame myself, John. If I hadn’t been wrong about Sykes, you would still be here. We would be together right now.
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
It’s especially hard without you this time of year. You know how I hate winters. How can I do this without you, John? How can I let go of the guilt?
Sherry kneaded the badge between her forefinger and thumb. She lay down on the sofa and put her head on a pillow; she hadn’t left this spot in her living room for weeks.
Brigham says I can’t go on like this. That you wouldn’t have approved. He said that if I give up, I give up all that you worked for. I turn my back on all the lives that Sykes took; even on Susan Paxton, whose own life changed the day that she first met me; even on my own mother.
He said, dear John, that I have an obligation to those who can no longer speak for themselves.
“He said”—she sobbed loudly, face contorted, lips trembling and barely able to utter the words out loud—“that you liked that part of me.”
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her wrists and put the badge to her lips.
I was so afraid of what I’d see when I took your hand at your funeral. Afraid of how I might react in front of the others. Afraid that perhaps I had been wrong about us.
She laughed and wiped her eyes and put the badge on the table.
Did you know that it would be your last gift to me? Did you know it would be the first time I ever saw my adult face?
Garland Brigham looked at Sherry in the dim light of the fire, set his glass of port on the stand, and began to slit another envelope open.
This one was about a rapist who suffocated his elderly victims in their beds with electrical cords. It was the third such case in a small Arkansas community in as many months. The police wanted to know if Sherry could help identify the killer.
The occasion was momentous; Sherry hadn’t allowed him to read the mail since last fall, had avoided his calls throughout the winter, wondering no doubt if the sunshine would ever return to the Delaware River.
“We should answer it, shouldn’t we, Garland? Maybe I could help.”
Acknowledgments
A number of people endured my years of literary trials and tribulations. You know who you are, and I will never forget your patience and contributions. I am especially grateful to my agent, Paul Fedorko of Trident Media Corp., for making dreams come true; it is an honor not only to work with you, but simply to know you.
To Shannon Firth, for your first little nudge.
To Rob Weisbach, who reached out and finally pulled me in. I won’t disappoint you.
To Simon & Schuster’s own Terra Chalberg and her tireless efforts to bring the best out of this work and me. You rock, Terra!
To all the wonderful and talented people at Simon & Schuster who so graciously and enthusiastically embraced me and my work.
To the citizens and police officers of Wildwood and Cape May, New Jersey, I apologize for my extremely liberal interpretations of your communities and professions, both of which I hold dear to my heart.
About the Author
GEORGE D. SHUMAN was raised on a farm in the Allegheny Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania. In the early 1970s he moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the Metropolitan Police Department, serving as an undercover narcotic detective; as a sergeant in the Special Assignments Branch, Internal Affairs Division; as operations commander of the Metropolitan Police Academy; and as lieutenant commander in the Public Integrity Branch, Internal Affairs Division.
Lieutenant Shuman retired from the government after twenty years of service and joined an international hotel management company as director of human resources. In the mid-1990s he moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he became director of operations for a consortium of luxury resorts.
He has two grown children, Daniel and Melissa, and now writes full-time between homes in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Please visit the author at www.georgedshuman.com.
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