A Darkness Absolute

by Kelley Armstrong

  That's how my morning will go. It will be peaceful and perfect and--

  "Answer the goddamned door!" Jen's voice shouts. "I know you're both in there."

  I squeeze my eyes shut.

  Jen shouts again. Storm jumps up and joins in with an answering howl. I lunge to grab her. Dalton grunts and half opens one unfocused eye.

  "Is that...," he begins.

  "No," I say. "Go back to sleep, and when you wake up, she'll be gone."

  "Good." He pulls me down, still holding the puppy, and drapes an arm over us as he closes his eyes again.

  "You're on the balcony?" Jen calls as she tramps around the back. "What the hell are you doing on the balcony?"

  Dalton rises on one arm to glower down at her.

  "You're naked on the balcony?" she says. "In the middle of winter? Is this some kind of weird Northern sex thing?"

  Dalton yanks up the blanket over his shoulders. Storm leaps past him and growls at Jen.

  "What the hell is the dog doing--" she begins. "No, forget I asked. That's a weird sex thing you guys can totally keep to yourselves."

  "We are sleeping," Dalton says. "Where we choose to do it is our own goddamn business."

  "Sleeping on the balcony? In winter? When there's a warm bed a few feet away? I guess congratulations are in order, Sheriff. You found a girlfriend who's as weird as you."

  "Get off my fucking--"

  "You need to come to the clinic."

  I scramble up, keeping a strategically held blanket in place. "What?"

  "I was on watch duty. Something's ... wrong. I'll meet you there."

  FIFTY-FIVE

  We don't get a chance to ask Jen what happened. Or tell her that if it's a medical emergency, she should be getting Anders.

  We dress fast and take off. Dalton detours to fetch Anders as I race into the clinic. Jen waits in the back room. Roger is where we left him, on the examining table, which comes complete with a removable foam mattress, sheets, side rails and restraints. In Rockton, everything serves a dual purpose.

  "What's the emergency?" I say as I walk in.

  Jen points at Roger.

  "He seems fine." I walk over and gently peel back the sheet, careful not to disturb his sleep. "Did his bleeding start again?"

  "I'm not a doctor, but I think that'd be a medical miracle."

  I look at her. She jabs a finger at Roger.

  I turn back to him. His eyes are closed. His color's fine, but I lay my hand on his forehead, in case he's running a fever.

  His forehead is cool.

  No, his forehead is cold.

  My hand flies to the side of his neck and then down to his wrist.

  "He ... he's..."

  "He's dead, Jen?" she says.

  I glare at her.

  "Not a Star Trek fan, I take it," she says. "Your kind never are."

  "I got the reference. The man is dead, Jennifer, which is really not the time to be cracking jokes. Or to be testing my powers of detection. Goddamn it."

  I grab the stethoscope to listen to his heart.

  "Yeah, that's not going to be beating," she says. "The whole being-dead thing."

  "Just because he appears to be dead doesn't absolutely mean he is."

  "So he's only mostly dead?"

  "Get out."

  "I--"

  "You sauntered across town to bring us some cryptic message, when maybe--just maybe--fetching Will instead could have saved this man. But no, it's really more fun to stand by his body and mock me with cinema lines."

  Her jaw sets, and she says, "I didn't saunter. I ran. And it wasn't a cryptic message. I just didn't know what to say. As for getting Will, I used the stethoscope. I knew there was no point."

  Anders runs in, Dalton right behind him. "What's the--"

  Anders stops short and says, "Shit," seeing Roger, now lolling to one side, an arm dangling. He hurries over and checks for a pulse.

  "I was just telling Jen that she should have gotten you first. In case there was a chance to fix this."

  "Yeah, no," Anders says. "I can't fix dead."

  He gets my glower now but meets it with a quarter smile. "Sorry. But no, he's been gone for a while."

  When Jen opens her mouth in victory, he shoots her a look and says, "Though she still should have gotten me first. That's proper protocol, which she'd know if she'd read the handbook I gave her. You want to be militia, Jen? It's about more than standing guard. It's following procedure. It's knowing procedure. And it's getting off your ass to check your charge once in a while. Whatever shit you've been spouting about my guys this week? None had their charge die on them."

  I brace for a sarcastic retort. She just stands there and takes it.

  "Can you tell us what happened?" I say, as calmly as I can. "Walk us through it."

  "I got in and talked to Paul--I was taking over from him. He said Roger was fine, and he did seem okay, so I sat down and read. I had my watch set to check him every hour, like the schedule says."

  She waits, as if expecting a head pat. I allow a grudging, "Good. And then?"

  "On my first check, he wasn't breathing. I thought I was mistaken. But I checked his pulse and used the stethoscope, and it was clear that he was gone. Succumbed to his injuries. If it was a natural death, I'd notify Will, as the coroner. But I figured, since the guy didn't fall on that knife twenty times by himself, that makes it homicide. Which goes to the detective."

  "You would still get me first," Anders says. "Both as head of the militia and the coroner. Okay?"

  She nods.

  "Did anyone else come in during your shift?"

  She shakes her head, and we dismiss her.

  *

  Roger does indeed appear to have "succumbed to his injuries." Naturally, we still check him, and the answer appears to be confirmed when we discover bloody froth in his mouth, which suggests his lungs actually were damaged. We open him up. I leave the cutting to Anders, but as a cop, I was known for my iron-clad stomach, which means I've attended enough autopsies that I could practically conduct one myself. Which is what I do here, leading Anders through the steps.

  One of Roger's lungs has collapsed and filled with blood. That's what killed him. A cut pierced a lung. Which means "succumbing to his injuries" is not the cause of death.

  It's murder.

  There's no way we missed that injury. It doesn't take twelve hours for a punctured lung to collapse. And we didn't give Roger nearly enough morphine to sleep through a collapsed lung. But according to Jen, he never even gasped, and when I found him, he looked as if he had indeed passed in his sleep. You can't fake that level of postmortem peace.

  When we check the morphine drip, it's been cranked up high enough that he'd have slept through another stabbing. Which he did, in a way, as someone inserted a thin blade and slid it into his lung.

  The big question was when it happened. There's only one likely possibility.

  We get Paul to the clinic without telling him that Roger has died. I start by asking exactly when Jen took over the watch shift and how the handover occurred.

  He tries to say she came by as scheduled, no issues, but I keep pressing and--with Dalton standing there, arms crossed--Paul finally cracks.

  "She was late," he says. "I didn't want to get her in trouble. I promised I wouldn't."

  "This is important," I say, and add a lie with, "We already knew she was late, so you aren't tattling. You're clarifying. How late was she?"

  "Will told her if she wanted a second shift, she had to get some sleep and come back at three. Three thirty came and went, and I started drifting off."

  "Did you?"

  "No way. I stepped outside to get some cold air, and I saw her coming."

  "So you waited for her."

  I phrase it as a statement, and he nods. When I ask how far away she was, he seems confused. I'm trying to establish how long no one was in the room with Roger--I just don't want Paul realizing that and fudging his answer.

  "Was she defini
tely heading here?" I ask. "Or just wandering after a night out?"

  "Oh, okay. She was heading here but taking her sweet time. Even when she saw me waiting, she didn't kick it in gear. I gave her shit when she finally got here. I told her she was nearly forty-five minutes late, and that's not how militia act, and it was my duty to report it to Will."

  "But instead you promised to cover for her."

  Paul shifts his weight. I keep pressing until he says, "She felt bad, and she wanted to make it up to me, so she, uh, gave me a hand."

  "Gave you a hand with what?" Dalton says.

  We both turn to look at him. It takes a second. Then Dalton says, "Fuck."

  "Nope," I say. "Just a hand."

  Paul reddens. "I didn't pay for it. I wouldn't. I know Isabel hates Jen freelancing. I mean, not that I'd pay for it anyway. But since Jen was offering it free, and I was kind of stressed, I didn't see any harm in accepting. It was quick."

  "How quick?"

  He goes even redder. "Not that quick. But she does know what she's doing and--"

  I raise a hand. "No details required. I'm just establishing a timeline. Did this take place on the front step where you met her?"

  I don't think it's possible for him to get redder. I'm wrong.

  "It ... started there. I mean, she, uh, reached in on the porch and then--"

  Dalton cuts in. "Like Casey said, we don't need details. We know the mechanics of the operation. So it began on the porch and then continued inside where it was warmer. In the room where the patient was sleeping?"

  "What? No. That would be wrong. We, uh, completed it here, in the front room. The door was closed, so even if he woke up, he wouldn't have seen anything. That'd be disrespectful."

  I don't continue pressing for an exact timing. I doubt he had a stopwatch running. Dalton dismisses him, watches him go and then says, "Way more information than I needed."

  "But just the amount I needed," I say. "String it all together, and Roger was alone in that room long enough for someone to break in the back and do the damage. Which works with the time line. Jen took over, and he seemed fine, but by her first check, he was dead."

  "Murdered," Dalton says. "And I quadrupled perimeter patrols last night. Which means we can be almost certain no one snuck in from the forest to do this. And if this was a local, then Nicole's capture probably was, too."

  "I think we can stop saying probably. We have a killer in Rockton. Again."

  FIFTY-SIX

  A few hours ago, I'd pictured my perfect breakfast. Hot fire, hot coffee, hot boyfriend cooking over a hot stove. I get all of that. Dalton has forbidden me to join Nicole's search party at first light. We'd be taking spots better given to people who are physically rested and mentally alert.

  So I get a quiet start to my day. I even have the warm puppy nestled on my lap. What I don't get, though, is perhaps the most important part of that fantasy--the peace of mind to enjoy it all. I'm petting Storm and sipping my coffee and watching Dalton, and I'm barely registering any of it, my brain immersed in Roger's murder, the implications and the possibilities.

  "There's something we need to discuss," Dalton says as he slides an egg onto my plate. "An issue we probably should have discussed four months ago."

  "Personal or professional?"

  "The intersection of the two."

  "Ah, the tricky kind."

  He finishes serving breakfast, and we sit on the sofa and eat half of it in hungry silence before he says, "When we got together, you said me being your boss would be a problem. I didn't understand why. But now I get it. Here"--he motions around the room--"we're equal partners. I'm better at cooking, so I do that. You've got a different idea of what 'tidy' means, so you do that. It all works out. In the office, I'm in charge, and you don't seem to have a problem taking orders from your boyfriend."

  "Because I'm not--I'm taking orders from my commanding officer. And when we leave the office, you never keep trying to give me orders. We're good at separating those roles."

  "But sometimes that separation isn't so easy." He takes a bite of his toast and chews. "As sheriff, I'm entrusted with secrets. Some would be helpful to your job, and I'd like to share them because knowing you as more than my detective, I know I can trust you with them."

  "Except they aren't your secrets to share."

  "That's the problem. But there is discretionary wiggle room. You've read my notes on what I suspect about residents. Those here under false pretenses."

  "Which are secrets you uncovered. Not ones you were entrusted with."

  He takes another bite of toast. Chews slowly. "So by that token, am I obligated to tell you everything I've uncovered?"

  "You aren't obligated to tell me anything, Eric."

  "Ethically obligated." He stops, shakes his head. "No, that's still the wrong phrasing. Ethically, I can tell you, because I uncovered it myself so it's become my secret to share. But there are things I uncover that aren't in that book. Just stuff I stumble over and file away here." He taps his forehead.

  "You can't be expected to share all of that." I put down my fork. "I know we're circling the theoretical, slowly approaching a specific."

  "Just get to the damned specific?" He puts his plate down. "Yeah, I'm still feeling this shit out. I'm used to being in charge. Sheriff and detective, the only person who needed to know anything until I was damned well ready to share. I wasn't deliberately withholding. I just never considered telling you this until I realized, fuck, I should have said something and now--"

  "Absolution comes after confession, Eric."

  "It's about Mathias. I told you and Will why he's here. There's more. Something I found a couple years back while double-checking his story."

  "A hole in it."

  "Hell, no. I'd have shared that right away. This is just additional information that didn't seem pertinent until I thought about who could have killed Roger."

  "Mathias fits. I've been thinking that myself. He had access to Roger. He has the medical know-how to pierce that lung and crank up the morphine drip. A practicing doctor would know we'd see through it, but he's never practiced medicine."

  He nods. "When I was researching Mathias's story, I came across one of those ... what's the word? When someone writes online about a subject they're interested in? Essays and such?"

  "Blogs?"

  "Right. I found this blog by a guy who liked weird crime. He covered Mathias's story about the patient who emasculated himself, and he linked it to another of Mathias's patients."

  "Another guy who--?"

  "No, not that. This guy was convicted of cannibalism. Fucking psycho. Hunted and killed people on the streets, homeless ones no one would miss. Cooked and ate them. The court found a shrink who got him committed. When Mathias studied the guy, he argued he wasn't insane at all. Just a sick bastard. Mathias wanted him retried on some loophole. Court refused. A month later, the guy disemboweled himself with a homemade shiv."

  "And he claimed Mathias made him do it?"

  Dalton shakes his head. "He died from his injuries. Never implicated Mathias. But this blog guy tied the two cases together as incidences of vigilante justice. He said Mathias brainwashed his patients into committing acts of self-mutilation befitting their crime."

  "The cannibal slicing open his own stomach and the rapist cutting off his own genitals."

  "Yep. Which is crazy. Unless..."

  "Unless it's not." I finish my toast and then say, "I'd believe it if the victims claimed Mathias physically forced them to mutilate themselves. Hell, I'd even buy drugs as the answer. It's the brainwashing part that bothers me."

  "Can't be done," Dalton says. "Mind control doesn't exist. The CIA sunk a shitload of time and money into chasing that pipe dream."

  When I raise my brows, he says, "It's a matter of public record. I don't trade in Brent's crazy conspiracy theories. The CIA admitted to it. They were trying to build the perfect assassin, someone they could order to kill, who would then forget it, allowing full deniabilit
y. They couldn't do it even with drugs."

  "So this is impossible."

  Dalton takes the whistling kettle off for fresh coffee. "That is impossible--forcing someone to do something and then forget it. Which isn't what we're talking about. The guy who survived remembered. He fingered Mathias."

  "So it's possible to control behavior? Just not reliably erase memory?"

  "I don't know. I didn't study those CIA files. Just found a reference in a book so I chased it down. Satisfying my curiosity. There are ways to influence behavior. The power of suggestion and shit like that."

  "Hypnosis," I say, remembering Anders's joke about Mathias. "In university, I went to a demonstration. I was curious, like you. It seemed more like people letting themselves be put into a suggestible state and then playing along. Which I guess is the power of suggestion. And I have seen shrinks pull up repressed memories with hypnosis so ... I don't know."

  "Neither do I. But is it possible? Put a guy with Mathias's training in a situation where he has total control over his subject, where no one's going to question his methods or drugs or whatever. Could he make a guy slice open his own guts, thinking he was butchering a deer?"

  "I won't say it's impossible."

  "Okay, so let's pretend Mathias did those things. He exacted fucked-up poetic justice on two pieces of scum. That'd be his motive for killing Roger. Taking justice into his own hands."

  "But his MO is punishments befitting the crimes. Straight from Dante's Inferno. The Mathias we know would need his drama. He'd wait and figure out the perfect punishment. He'd also wait until we had Nicole."

  "Fuck," Dalton has stopped making coffee and stands there.

  "If you get stuck on motive, though, you stop seeing the facts. The fact is that Mathias fits for Roger's death. He even fits for Nicole's second capture. He made a point of being kind to her, which is unusual for him. He has access to the benzo and a reason to be in her house to dose her tea. Forget revenge. If we're looking at a council spy who got rid of Nicole and Roger, Mathias fits."

  I lean back. "With a stretch, he fits for all of it. We decided he couldn't have taken Robyn because he arrived after she disappeared. But it was only a few months later. What if she left to live in the forest, and he found her there? The timeline isn't impossible, and that timeline was the only thing that kept him from being a suspect. He's thinner than Nicole reported, but size is easy to fake with extra clothing. He could also have faked the dark hair Sutherland saw. Mathias spent his life studying criminals. He would know how to do this and get away with it. Part of it could be him."