W
hat Marley wanted most was to leave her workroom, lock the door behind her and find Gray.
“You do not run away.”
The Ushers started a new attack and she shook her head.
“Keep working,”
they told her.
“Do you know where this is?” Marley said to them, indicating the house. “This is why it was given to me. Because it’s a replica of the place where those missing women are. Please help me find the real house, or whatever it is.” She had asked them before, but got only hushed gabbling in response.
The same agitated, rising and falling sounds made her light-headed. “Hush. Answer my question.” She couldn’t bear the noise.
“You push and fuss,”
they told her.
“Work on the house and be ready to travel. Soon.”
Unwillingly, she faced the bench and selected a tool. She began the painstaking task of removing flakes of varnish and laquer from the wall facing the front gate. She had closed the back of the house again, unable to look at that cupboard and the stairs, or to remember the pounding she had felt when she was last there—and the cries she’d heard.
The flakes came away more easily than she expected and she lowered her goggles over her eyes again. Perhaps the refinishing wasn’t as old as she had thought. The longer ma
terials remained in place, the more they tended to cling, one layer to another, and be hard to remove.
This was not an item she would ever sell—in fact the sooner she could be rid of it, the better. Belle, whoever she may have been, must have recognized Marley as a sister-traveler and hoped the dollhouse would become her portal.
A small, very sharp-edged chisel wouldn’t have been her usual choice for the job, but she took up the tool and began sliding it beneath the red outer coat. It lifted in remarkably large pieces and beneath each one she found more of the faded terra-cotta-colored finish that appeared to have been stippled to look like stucco.
She worked steadily for half an hour before standing back to look at her efforts. Now she knew that in addition to the added door at one corner of the building, galleries had probably been removed from an upper story. The marks where they had been could be seen now, together with the remnants of flowers painted on the walls as if hanging down—to depict the way the pretty local balconies were loaded with plants.
Surely there had been a front door. She started lifting flakes in the center front, only to have pieces of green curl away where the elevated lawns met the base of the house. Having seen the basement disguised by the mound, she knew to expect any alterations. But evidence that pillars had been removed surprised her. Why go to such lengths to disguise a dollhouse?
The basement, she realized, was not actually beneath ground level—it simply had grass-covered earth mounded against its walls. It had been hidden from the outside.
The front door began to appear in the center between places where two pillars had been.
The chatter began again. Different than she had heard before. Agitation was something she expected, but this became a rising and falling wail, anguish, and not a single discernable word except,
No
, repeated again and again.
Marley worked faster and faster, steadily revealing the walls of the dollhouse as they had once been.
She dropped the chisel. Not accidentally, but because it fell from her fingers of its own volition.
The room darkened.
Winnie gave a single muffled whine.
No lights formed on the ceiling, no sign of a funnel appeared, and the Ushers were quiet.
Marley’s eyes opened wide. She couldn’t blink. A deep, deep longing didn’t shock her. She wanted Gray. He was her and she was him and together they were a whole with twice the power of their individuality. When she had first seen him, complete with the scars that were imprinted on his memory but not his face, he had come to her because they were destined to be together. Their Bonding had been preordained.
A wind or a strong current wrapped her body and carried her backward. She stumbled over Winnie, but couldn’t react. The dog didn’t cry out.
Free falling, she tried to move her arms, but they remained splayed at her sides until she settled on her back, staring upward into the darkness.
Marley had no feeling at all, other than anticipation.
She saw a small room, old-fashioned, but plush. A woman, older and plainly dressed in gray, but wearing an elaborate rose-colored tulle hat, paced, wringing her hands, but it wasn’t the woman that held Marley’s attention.
A little girl sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair and whereas the woman moved in shadow, the child was illuminated as if by a spotlight. Thin with blond braids and dressed in a white buttoned blouse and jeans, her sneakered feet swung inches off the floor.
She stared ahead, her blue eyes huge behind round glasses.
She stared at Marley.
The child took gulps of air through her mouth. She
coughed, but never looked away from Marley. Tears ran slowly down the girl’s cheeks.
Marley tried to speak to her, but couldn’t.
Two small hands extended toward Marley and the little girl said, “Come and get me, please. He said if you come I can go home.”
Marley reached for the girl. “Where are you?” she said, and this time had no difficulty speaking. “Tell me where to find you.”
In front of the child, the face of Pearl Brite appeared. This time the woman’s beautiful skin was marred by the type of welts Marley knew too well. “You’ll know how to come,” Pearl said. “He says you’ve been here before, but you must come quickly or it’ll be too late.”
But she didn’t know how to get there. These visions had nothing to do with the house. There had been no portal. She had not left her body. There was power worked upon her, yes, but a different power.
It was that creature, she was sure of it.
“I don’t know how to come to you,” she said, choking on each word.
“Be ready,” Pearl said, and dropped her voice to a faint whisper. “He’s torturing us.”
G
ray could have closed his eyes and followed the sound of sirens to their destination. Any hope of keeping the lid on even part of the investigation was gone. Thanks to the screaming cars, their lights flashing, humanity in the streets had turned like a tide to rush, staring, after the police cars, the medic vehicles—and what most of the public wouldn’t recognize as the most ominous sign of all—a large, white crime scene van with its multiple locked compartments.
He and Nat had barely arrived back at the precinct from the morgue when the call came in for Nat to get to Caged Birds on N. Peters Street, the club where Pipes Dupuis used to sing.
The meeting with Blades had frustrated both of them. He seemed to want information, but he wasn’t giving any hints that might nudge them in the right direction. Nat and Gray both came away with the feeling that Blades knew more than he was telling—not that the bizarre DNA discussion hadn’t been absorbing enough on its own.
Gray had tested the theory that Blades didn’t have any final reports and was probably wrong, but he only got more convinced the M.E. could be right.
Bucky Fist drove with Nat at his side. Voices barked over the radio and Nat carried on what sounded like a monologue with brief flurries of punctuation.
Sunk deep in the backseat, Gray tried to call Marley. He
got her canned message—again. By now she’d be with Sidney Fournier, not an idea that gave him comfort.
A body had been found at Caged Birds.
So far there was no identification.
Bucky tucked the car into the trough formed by official vehicles ahead and cruised, one elbow resting on the window rim.
“You sure there’s no ID yet?” Gray said, raising his voice over the jet stream of warm, wet wind through Bucky’s window.
“If I knew—you’d know,” Nat said without turning around.
“What d’you hope for?” Gray asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You want a new one or an old one?”
Nat snorted. “Nice turn of phrase. If it’s Liza, Amber or Pearl I don’t think I’ll feel better than if it’s another one.
Goddammit
. As long as they stay gone, there’s hope. Maybe they’re renovating that dump of a club and an accident got misreported.”
“Sure,” Gray said. He breathed out slowly. “We can hope.” But he didn’t.
In front of Caged Birds, official vehicles turned the street into a parking lot. Bucky slipped into a spot and the three of them got out.
Nat led the way into the club. Even with the doors blocked open it reeked of stale beer. Gray didn’t recall a bar or club that didn’t look tawdry in daylight.
Weak but definite, he smelled traces of an unforgettable odor, the one that faded slowly after Marley’s encounter at River Road. The same one that hung around Shirley Cooper’s body.
He deliberately looked ahead, past Nat and Bucky and the bevy of uniforms waiting for instructions.
The first face he recognized was the gouge-cheeked pale one belonging to Dr. Blades. Gray’s stomach turned
over. Blades was a man who considered himself too important to get down in the trenches, at least until initial dirty work was done. Since Blades had to be all of seven feet tall he’d be hard to miss in any crowd, but standing back from everyone else, staring straight ahead and completely immobile, he was as out of place in the teeming club as the Eiffel Tower would be in the middle of a school yard recess.
“That stench again,” Nat said abruptly, putting his hand to his nose. “It’s different from a decomposing body, but it’s filthy. It was around Shirley Cooper the first time I saw her body, too.”
Desperation rattled Gray. “I could still smell it today.” With every passing hour he was more convinced that Marley was marked for attack by a maniac.
Chief Beauchamp was the next unwelcome surprise. He saw Nat and approached, head slightly down like a bull coming in for a charge. “Interrupt your tanning session, did I?” he said when Nat got close enough. He showed no sign of noticing how inappropriate his comment was.
Gray saw her.
Crime scene spotlights glared on the first of the two suspended cages. Inside, her back to Gray, her wrists taped to the uppermost bars, hung a woman partially covered by strips of torn clothing.
Cameras clacked, technicians moving rapidly but precisely to get every angle of a scene worthy of a horror movie.
He recognized Bernie Bois, the club manager, his rangy body sprawled in a chair, his hands covering his face.
“Who is she?” Nat asked Beauchamp.
The older man ran a hand over his sweating head and hair. “I’ll settle for who she isn’t,” he said. “Some guy from Scully’s is being tracked down to take a look.”
“Danny Summit,” Nat said.
Beauchamp grunted. “The last missing female’s father is
being brought over, poor bastard. I’m talking about the one that went missing—supposedly—in the warehouse on—”
Gray cut him off. “It’s not Pearl Brite,” he said.
Beauchamp slowly looked in his direction. “Fisher? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d pop in for a pick-me-up.”
“Funny. You heard the question.” Beauchamp’s face plumped up and got shinier. “Why are you here?”
“He came with me,” Nat said. “He’s been giving us a hand. Knows some of the singers.”
“Yeah?” Beauchamp’s deep-set eyes were very close to the bridge of his nose. They turned crafty. “How come?”
“I was writing about them,” Gray said wearily.
“Oh, yeah. You quit the force to be a reporter.”
Why bother to explain himself? “Right.”
“Take a look then,” Beauchamp said.
Nat and Bucky fell in with Gray when he approached the cage and the cameras were quiet.
“She’s stacked,” Beauchamp said in a loud voice.
Gray resisted an urge to turn back and punch the guy out. He didn’t miss some snickers, but there were more muffled exclamations of disgust.
“There was no hurry to cut her down,” a tech said to Nat. “The photos could be invaluable, sir.”
The woman was obviously as dead as she would get. “Yeah,” Nat said.
“There was a bag over her head,” the same tech said. “We cut it off, so we could see…”
“Her face,” Nat said.
“What’s left of it,” Gray said.
He stood close enough to the cage to touch it if he wanted to. The woman might as well be naked. She had been reduced to a crude parody of sadistic sexuality, her dress torn from her shoulders to reveal naked breasts cross-hatched with welts. Blood had dried—a long time ago—on her belly
and thighs. The patterns resembled those on Shirley Cooper’s body.
Slowly, Gray looked past a sizable puncture wound in her neck, and back at her face. Where her eyes should have been, two holes gaped. Her cheekbones and nose were crushed and black hair stuck to wounds in the skin.
Only the mouth, slack but untouched, was as Gray remembered it, that and a small black birthmark just above the right side of the upper lip.
Nat touched his arm. “It’s—”
“Liza Soaper,” Gray said. “She was special. She could belt out a foot-stomping number or sing lyrics that made you want to cry, and she was decent. I’m going to find the bastard who did that to her and—”
Bucky whistled loudly, drowning out the rest of Gray’s sentence.
Nat waited until he could be heard and said, “I’ll help you.”
“A word?” Dr. Blades sidled near and kept on moving toward the front of the building.
Nat and Gray glanced at one another and followed quickly and quietly.
Blades left the club and walked to the opposite side of the street.
“You aren’t leaving now, are you?” Nat said. “Won’t you stick around until she’s taken down?”
“Yes,” Blades said shortly. “I don’t want to talk in that zoo. I’ll go back after we’ve spoken. She’s been kept frozen.”
Gray stared at the man.
“She’s still fairly solid so it’ll make establishing time of death more difficult,” Blades continued. “That much I’ll share with that fool, Beauchamp.”
“What won’t you share with him?” Nat bounced onto his toes.
“Did you notice the stench?” Blades asked.
“Yes,” Nat and Gray said in unison.
“Shirley Cooper’s body has the same odor—although it’s faded a lot.”
“We noticed.” Gray shoved his hands into his pockets and kept his peace.
“We jumped to conclusions about this thing being some sort of alligatorlike monster,” Blades said.
“But from another planet,” Nat said, perfectly serious.
“From somewhere we’ve never been,” Blades said. “I’ve got to get back now, but did you notice there are scratches and bites—it’s the bites that drew blood. I did the sniff test, and that’s also where the smell of very old rotting flesh is hanging around. Not the scratches. It’s the teeth that do the real damage.”
Gray swallowed.
“Okay,” Nat said slowly.
“I think our particular monster may be a pretty impressive copy of something we know all about these days. Except for the obvious differences. Varanus komodoensis.”
Gray shrugged and shook his head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Or me,” Nat said.
Blades nodded. “I don’t have time for a lecture now. Take a look at what the experts say about the Komodo dragon.”