“It wasn’t a person,” said Sammy.
“Yes, it was,” said Tasha.
“No, it wasn’t. It was nobody.”
“It was a man, stupid. Kind of a man, anyhow.”
“It was nobody. There was nobody there.”
“Yes, there was.”
“Wasn’t.”
“Was.”
Dr. Flaurus interrupted them. “Tasha, when you say ‘kind of a man,’ what exactly do you mean?”
Tasha looked downward and sideways, as if she didn’t want to face her recollection directly. When she spoke, she shook her fingers as if she were trying to describe something flickery and insubstantial.
“All of a sudden he was just there.”
“You mean he came straight into the house without ringing the bell or knocking on the door?”
“No. He was just there, in the middle of the den. He just appeared.”
“I didn’t see him,” said Sammy.
“Well you’re blind.”
“I’m not blind. If I’m blind, where’s my dog?”
“Okay, okay,” said Dr. Flaurus. “Let’s say that he just appeared. What did he look like?”
Tasha was shaking the fingers of both hands now. “He was black and white, and he was all jumpy and jittery, like those people in those very old Charlie Chaplin movies. I couldn’t see him very clearly because he wouldn’t keep still.”
“Did you see his face?”
“It kept changing. It was like he had lots of faces.”
“Can you describe any of them?”
“One face looked as if he was shouting, with his mouth wide open. Another face looked really mean, with his eyes all squinched up. I saw another face, too, but that was like an animal. A deer, or a dog—something with a stretched-out head.”
“I didn’t see him,” said Sammy. “Daddy didn’t see him, either.”
“How do you know that your daddy didn’t see him?”
“Because Daddy walked into the den and said let’s all go swimming.”
Dr. Flaurus frowned. “He walked right in and you don’t think that he could see this man at all?”
“There wasn’t a man. Tasha’s making it up.”
Tasha turned on him. “There was too! If there wasn’t a man, who killed Daddy? Who tore his arms and his legs off and pulled off his head?”
Sammy quivered, as if he had wet himself, and didn’t answer.
Tasha said, “I don’t think Daddy did see him. But I did. When Daddy came into the den the man turned around and took hold of Daddy’s neck. He pulled his head off. It was like when you pull the head off a doll except there were strings and tubes and blood. I shut my eyes and I think I screamed but I can’t remember.”
Sammy had turned very pale, and he was trembling. Lily put her arm around him and held him very close. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all over now. You’re safe. Nobody can hurt you now.”
“I didn’t see any man,” he insisted. “Daddy’s head came off, but it just jumped up, all by itself. I didn’t see any man.”
Lily touched Dr. Flaurus’s arm. “I think that’s enough for now, don’t you?”
“Of course. Yes. There’s only one more question I want to ask. Tasha—did you see the man leave?”
Tasha shook her head.
“What I mean is, did you see him physically walk out of the door?”
“No. He turned around, and he disappeared.”
“Just like that? Like a magic trick?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Flaurus took Lily into a small office next to the day-room. Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg were there, along with a sunburnt sandy-haired man in an olive-green summer suit. Special Agent Kellogg switched off the loudspeaker that they had been listening to.
“Mrs. Blake, this is Detective Nick Moynihan, Tampa PD.”
Lily nodded in acknowledgment.
“Sorry about everything that’s happened,” said Detective Moynihan. “Seems like those kids of yours are pretty shook up.”
“Thank you. Will I be able to take them home today?”
“Maybe tomorrow morning. The doctors want to make sure their blood volume is back up to normal.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to interview them again,” said Special Agent Rylance. “This story about a man who just appeared—or who didn’t appear—we really need to get to the bottom of this.”
“There’s nothing to get to the bottom of,” Lily protested. “Those poor children saw their father torn limb from limb, right in front of their eyes. You don’t seriously expect them to say anything that makes any sense?”
“Children usually make excellent witnesses,” said Detective Moynihan. “No prejudice, no assumptions. They see things for what they are.”
“Or what they aren’t, in this case,” added Special Agent Rylance.
Special Agent Kellogg said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Blake. We do need to clarify their stories. We can’t exactly put out a ‘most wanted’ picture of a black-and-white character from a Charlie Chaplin movie, with three different faces.”
Dr. Flaurus took hold of Lily’s arm. “I’ll be very gentle with them, I promise. It isn’t unusual for witnesses to imagine that they’ve seen something really strange, especially when they’re in shock. It’s like looking at a flowery-patterned fabric and seeing faces in it. And it’s amazing how many witnesses don’t see something that happened right in front of them. Did you ever see those experiments they did when they had a man in a gorilla suit walk right through the middle of a basketball game? Dozens of spectators never even noticed him.”
“I don’t think we’re looking for a guy in a gorilla suit, Doctor,” said Special Agent Rylance. “More like a real gorilla. I mean—who has the physical strength to tear a man to pieces with his bare hands? And for Christ’s sake, what was his motive? And why did he take most of Jeff Blake’s body away with him?”
Special Agent Kellogg said, “We also need to check out if this has anything to do with the FLAME homicide in Minneapolis. Very similar MOs, after all. Ripped to pieces, both of them, by an unseen assailant. And they’re both linked to Tasha and Sammy’s kidnapping.”
Lily was strongly tempted to confess: I asked a Native American medicine woman to conjure up the Wendigo, and the Wendigo kills and eats anybody who gets in its way. But what was the point? They would simply think she was suffering from stress, and how could she possibly convince them that it was true? John Shooks would deny everything; and so would George Iron Walker and Hazawin.
“I only wish I could help,” she told them. “Jeff and I—we were always arguing—always at each other’s throats. But I would never have wanted him dead.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Blake,” said Special Agent Kellogg, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You can go back to Tasha and Sammy now. Dr. Flaurus will need to talk to them again, but not until tomorrow morning.”
Lily was just about to leave the office when a plump, bespectacled woman came bustling in, wearing a noisy green Tyvek suit. She had tightly curled hair and a large mole on her chin, and she smelled strongly of latex and disinfectant. “Detective, I just thought you’d like to know that we’ve discovered some more of Mr. Blake’s remains.”
Detective Moynihan turned to Lily and said, “Mrs. Blake—you probably don’t want to hear this.”
The crime-scene specialist flushed red. “I’m truly sorry, ma’am. I didn’t realize that you were the next of kin.”
“What have you found? Please, I want to know. I was married to him for eleven years.
“You’re sure?”
Lily nodded, so Detective Moynihan turned to the crime-scene specialist and said, “Okay, then, go ahead. But, you know, easy on the graphic details.”
The crime-scene specialist was blowing her nose into a crumpled Kleenex. “Sorry—allergy,” she sniffed. “We haven’t completed our investigation yet, by any means, but we can tell you that Mr. Blake was dismembered with extreme force, judging by the blood spatter,
and almost instantaneously. Within seconds, in fact.
“So far we can’t even conjecture how this was done. We’ve never come across a case like this before. But after he was dismembered, his left arm and a portion of his rib cage were left on the floor of the den, while the remainder of his body was carried out of the den, across the breakfast area, and out of the sliding doors at the rear of the house.”
She took out a small notebook and flicked through it. “We found a pattern of blood spatter leading from the den to the backyard, but the droplets are anything between thirteen and seventeen inches apart and each one struck the floor at an unusually acute angle.”
“From which you conclude what?”
“The perpetrator was carrying what was left of Mr. Blake at a considerable lick. He was running. In fact, he was more than running. He was exiting that beach house like a bat out of hell.”
“With three-quarters of a human body in his arms?”
“I can only tell you, Detective, what the evidence tells us.”
Detective Moynihan glanced at Lily and his expression was distinctly unhappy. Lily looked away. The more she heard, the guiltier she felt, and she was sure that it showed on her face. At least Jeff had died quickly, and he hadn’t suffered. But she could still remember the moles on his shoulder. She could still remember the sound of his laugh.
“You, uh—you said that you’d discovered some more remains,” said Detective Moynihan.
“Well, that’s right,” said the crime-scene specialist, wiping her nose again. “I’m afraid there’s no delicate way I can put this. We found a length of small intestine approximately eighteen feet long that had caught on the picket fence at the end of the yard. It had obviously been stretched out to the limits of its tolerance and then snapped. It was dangling over the children’s swing set next door.”
“Jesus. How high is the swing set?”
“Seven feet six inches. At first we thought that the perpetrator might have climbed over the swing set, with the intestine trailing behind him, but there would have been no logical reason for him to do that. He didn’t need to go that way. He could have escaped in any direction, without anybody seeing him. Apart from that, there are no scuffs or handprints on the swing set and absolutely no foot impressions on the sand that surrounds it, except for children’s feet.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“We were pretty confused at first, I have to admit. But then seven houses away, directly to the north, we found several shreds of the victim’s stomach lining, and a section of his trachea—his windpipe—as well as a quantity of fatty tissue.”
Detective Moynihan glanced at Lily again, but Lily said, “It’s all right. Don’t worry about me,” even though she was beginning to feel that encroaching darkness that came upon her whenever she was going to faint.
“We found those remains on the roof, Detective,” said the crime-scene specialist. “They were all tangled up in a TV antenna, thirty-five feet off the ground. And of course that explained everything.”
“I see. The perpetrator could fly.”
“Well, obviously not. But we have to assume that—as he exited the sliding doors at the rear of the beach house—he dropped some of the victim’s viscera on to the patio. They would have been very slippery, after all—hard to keep hold of.”
“So then what?”
“Seagulls: that’s our theory; or maybe pelicans. They’re scavengers, after all. After the perpetrator had run away, two or three of them picked up the viscera and flew off with them.”
“You’re serious?”
“There’s no other explanation. Bird number one made off with the small intestine, but the end got snagged on the fence, and the bird was unable to pull it free. Bird number two made off with the stomach lining and the trachea and the other stuff, but they were too much for it to carry in its beak, or else it was attacked in mid-flight by yet another bird. Whatever it was, it dropped the remains on the roof. Nothing supernatural. Just plain old-fashioned ornithology.”
Detective Moynihan said to Lily, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Blake. You shouldn’t have had to hear this.”
Lily raised both hands. “That’s all right. Once we’re dead, we’re dead, aren’t we? I could have been nothing but ashes now, if Jeff had had his way.”
The next morning Dr. Flaurus talked to Tasha and Sammy again, but they told her the same story. Tasha had seen a flickering man and Sammy hadn’t.
After forty-five minutes Dr. Flaurus took Lily aside and said, “They’re still very traumatized. I think they’ve each invented an imaginary scenario in order to protect themselves from remembering what really happened. I don’t think we’re going to be able to get at the truth until they’ve been through therapy.”
“Can I take them home?”
“If the doctors approve, yes. They need familiar surroundings, and security. I haven’t talked to my head of department at Quantico yet, but I think she’ll want me to interview them three or four more times, if that’s okay with you. Believe me, I want them to recover from this experience as much as you do. But I think it will help them tremendously if I can persuade them to tell me what really happened.”
Lily said nothing. She knew that Tasha and Sammy had already described with complete faithfulness how Jeff had been killed. Tasha had seen the Wendigo because it was facing her. Sammy hadn’t seen it because it was standing edgewise—like a sheet of paper.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She didn’t really believe that it was all over until they had arrived home, and she had run a deep foamy bath for them, and washed their hair, and dressed them up in their own pajamas, which had been lying neatly folded in their bedroom drawers for so long.
Then they sat around the kitchen table while she made them their favorite supper: Dutch potato scramble, with diced bacon, fried red potatoes, sliced red onions, and eggs. As a special treat she allowed Sergeant to come into the kitchen, too. He sat with his head in Tasha’s lap, his eyes rolled up in sheer pleasure while Tasha stroked his ears. Spongebob Squarepants was showing on the TV, Sammy’s favorite, and no evening could have been more normal, or warmer, or felt so complete.
“Mommy, are you going to grow your hair now?” asked Sammy.
“Yes—yes, I am,” said Lily. “In fact I think I’m going to grow it really long. The last time I grew it really long was at high school. I used to tie it in a ponytail.”
“I like you bald.”
“Well, I shaved my hair off for a reason. I did it to show people that I was never going to stop looking for you, no matter what.”
“Daddy said you didn’t really want us any more. He said you were glad to see the back of us.”
“I know he did. But he wasn’t very well. I think we have to forgive him, don’t you?”
Tasha said, “Would you forgive him if he was still alive?”
Lily broke four eggs into the skillet, and stirred them around. “Good question,” she said. She could tell that Tasha was growing up.
“Is there going to be a funeral?” asked Sammy.
“Yes. When the FBI have released Daddy’s body.”
“He was all in bits. They’ll have to put him back together again before they bury him.”
“Yes, they will. But they have people who are very good at doing that.”
“Do they sew them together, or do they use Crazy Glue?”
Dr. Flaurus had warned Lily that the children would want to talk about their experience, and that she shouldn’t try to discourage them, no matter how ghoulish it got.
“I guess they probably sew them.”
They sat down to eat. Sammy wolfed down his scramble as if he hadn’t been fed in a week, but Tasha only toyed with hers. Lily saw that she had tears in her eyes, and she reached across the table and held her hand.
“You’ll get over it, sweetheart. One day you’ll go to bed and you’ll realize that you haven’t thought about it, even once.”
“We had such a good time,” said Tasha, misera
bly. “It was almost like being in heaven.”
“I know. Your daddy only wanted to make you happy.”
“But we didn’t care about you. We hardly ever talked about you. How could we have been so mean?”
“You weren’t being mean. You were enjoying yourselves, that’s all. If I was down in Florida, swimming and horseback riding and going to Busch Gardens all the time, I wouldn’t want to think about snow, and school, and tidying my room.”
Tasha wiped her eyes with her fingers. In the short time that she had been away she had started to change, and she was already looking like a young woman rather than a child. She reminded Lily so much of herself at that age, except that Tasha had Jeff’s eyes—pale turquoise, and slightly unfocused-looking, as if she were short-sighted, although she wasn’t.
They spent the rest of the evening in the living room, sprawled on the couch in front of the fire. Lily had stacked the logs up high, and the fire blazed so fiercely that their faces grew flushed. She told them everything that she had done since Jeff had kidnapped them: how she had spent Christmas with Agnes and Ned, and how Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg had called her almost every day.
At nine-thirty she took Sammy up to bed and tucked him in. He looked at her solemnly over his candy-striped sheet and said, “Goodnight, Mommy. I’m really glad I’m home.”
She smiled and stroked his hair. “I’m glad you’re home, too. And I think the house is glad. Can you feel how happy it is? I think it missed you.”
“I was too short to go on the Gwazi. You have to be four feet ten.”
“Never mind. I’ll take you snowmobiling next week. You’re not too short for that.”
“Cool!”
She kissed him. He smelled like freshly baked shortbread. He wrapped his arms around her neck and held her so tight that he hurt her.
“Mommy?”
“What is it?”
“That nobody who killed Daddy . . . he can’t come here, can he?”
“Of course not. You’re safe here.”
She left his bedroom door slightly ajar and the landing light on. “Remember . . . if you have any bad dreams—if you get frightened by anything at all—you just come to my bedroom and wake me up. I won’t mind a bit.”
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