Authors: Nicholas Wolff
“Okay, okay.” Nat moved his index finger to his temple and
rubbed hard. “So . . . maybe then someone was jabbing Walter in the back as he got ready to hang himself? Well . . . it then explains the rope around his wrists. Coercion.”
“I’d call it more than jabbing,” John said. “I checked with Hobart and he says the wounds went an inch deep. I don’t think it’s a matter of Prescott not wanting to step up on that crate.”
Nat considered this.
“You think Becca saw anything?” John said hopefully.
Nat blinked rapidly a couple of times. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t get the feeling she’s protecting anyone. She wants to know what happened as much as we do.”
John looked over at his friend and rested his hand on Nat’s shoulder. “We’re going to need you on this.”
Because of Becca, of course. In a way, Nat approved of her refusal to talk to the cops. Solving Walter’s murder wasn’t a psychiatric priority; saving his daughter was. She was as fragile and as complex a case, a
person
, as any he’d ever encountered. And, as much as he loved John, his friend was fairly ham-handed when it came to women, especially high-strung women, not to mention nineteen-year-olds suffering from Cotard delusion and God knew what else. If John insisted on questioning her further, he might send the girl scuttling back into silence.
I’ll talk to you
, Becca had said to Nat before John had left the room.
I’ll
only
talk to you.
When Nat had heard those words, a warmth had spread across his chest. The look of fragility and defiance in those brown eyes . . . he had to admit, it had moved him.
Now Nat took two Stellas from the fridge, popped the caps, and handed one to John. “I need to know about Margaret Post. Everything,” Nat said.
John flicked the channel selector. “Where’s ESPN?”
“576.”
John frowned in complete concentration.
“John?”
John grunted.
“What happened to Margaret?”
John slowly put down the remote. He watched two ex-football players on
SportsCenter
talking about an upcoming AFC divisional championship. Finally he looked over at Nat. “What do you wanna know?”
Nat shrugged. “How was she killed?”
“Knife. Or could be a bayonet, I suppose. Slit her throat.”
“That’s it?”
John bent his head forward and rubbed the back of his neck. “No,” he said finally.
“What else, then?”
“How does this help us find out what’s going on?”
“Damned if I know.”
John stared at the screen, stone-faced. “Whoever did it removed things.”
Removed things.
Nat felt something run through him, a suppressed hysterical laugh, followed by a wave of dread. It was almost as if he’d expected John to say that.
“Organs?”
“Yep.”
“Which ones?”
John looked over. “Which
ones
? Does it matter?”
“I guess not.”
John sighed. “You got any pretzels in here?”
Nat gestured with his hand in the direction of the cupboard. John launched himself from the couch and came back a minute later with a handful of mustard-flavored mini-pretzels on a napkin.
“Want some?”
Nat shook his head and took a gulp of his Stella. The fresh cold beer ran down his throat, seeming to revive him, and he immediately took a longer pull.
John smacked his lips with gusto and held the bottle out to look at the label.
“Fancy shit you’ve got here. But not bad.” He looked at Nat. His eyes were full of warning. He took a deep breath. “Liver. Both kidneys. And the heart.”
“Did he sew her back up?”
He heard John stop drinking the beer suddenly and heard the Stella sloshing in the bottle. “How’d you know that?”
“It was a guess.”
“Yeah. That freaked me out worse than anything. Why do you spend the time fixing her back up, as if she’s going to jump back up and
not notice
that you’ve just removed her fucking heart? And to take that time, right off a major road? It was a crazy risk.”
Nat stared at the moon in the loft window. “Jack the Ripper took some organs, but he didn’t stitch his victims back together. What about some kind of cult?”
“We’re looking into it. I’m praying we don’t have some little Satanists running around.”
“That would suck for you.”
John laughed. “Yeah, right?”
“You don’t think Becca could have had anything to do with Walter, do you?”
The answer came after a three-beat pause. “That I don’t know.”
The words hung there between them.
John gestured toward Nat with the beer bottle. “Do me a favor. If she talks to you, ask the girl if she’d seen anyone around. If her father had any visitors.”
“That might be tough, old man. She doesn’t believe Prescott was her father. She’d blocked him out of her life.”
He’d already explained the Cotard delusion theory to John on the way back from the Shan. John had seemed to absorb the basic points, but not the subtleties.
Nat looked out at Grant’s Hill. “Gotta say, there was something strange going on at that house that I have to understand. Something beyond pathology. Something . . .”
“Evil?” John said, widening his eyes with humor.
“Yeah. As corny as it sounds.”
He watched shadows flooding over the hill’s summit as the sun sank in the west. He looked at John.
“My first duty is Becca, John. But I’ll do whatever I can.”
“All I’m asking, bro. All I am asking.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
T
he Toyota coughed roughly and then purred to life. Chuck Godwin reminded himself to call the mechanic’s to see when the Volvo would be ready. The Toyota was serviceable, but he missed the block-like solidity of his Swedish car.
He was parked down the block from Mary Reddington’s house, and he was late getting home. Mary had been especially randy after their decades-long drought, answering the door in an old silk bathrobe that she’d parted to reveal plum-colored panties and a matching lacy bra, rich against her pale, freckled skin. They were both working off years and years of stored-up sexual drive.
Thinking of some time away with Mary—Barbados, or all the way to Hawaii?—Chuck pulled the gearshift into drive and gave the car some gas. He did a U-turn and headed toward Willow.
Barbados would be good. Mary would adore the surprise. And he could tell Stephanie he had to meet a skittish client who couldn’t come back to the country. Paternity issues. Why not?
He drove down Willow Street. Dusk was stealing over the city, and the light was turning a pearly gray. He could see the red light at the foot of the hill on Wellesley Avenue, glowing a hundred yards ahead like a buoy on a fog-shrouded sea. But there was something in the road just beyond it he couldn’t make out. Chuck hit the wipers, and they pushed aside the icy raindrops on the windshield with a loud, rhythmic squeaking.
For the first time, the thought of leaving Stephanie completely and spending his remaining years with Mary sailed
cleanly into his thoughts. Why live a lie? Why waste whatever time he had left? His hands were still warm from the touch of Mary’s flesh. He felt swaddled in the heat of their last moments together.
What would the financial implications of a divorce be? How much would it cost him? The house, surely, and half his Fidelity account, but he had two accounts under his dead son’s name in a private bank in Boston that should tide him over. Just thinking about doing it made his whole body feel lighter.
He was coming up on the intersection. The thing in the road beyond the stoplight was a car, an old cream-colored Mercedes-Benz, that appeared to have stalled out. It looked like Betty Whitmore’s car, the one she drove to church and to the supermarket at about 12 mph.
Those old diesels
, he thought to himself in annoyance.
Why do people drive them in winter when they’re always freezing up?
Because if it was Betty or one of his neighbors, he’d have to stop and try to help, costing him more time. He couldn’t just shoot by the stalled car on his way home, as much as he wanted to.
When Chuck was twenty yards away, he heard something whine on the hill to his left. Probably a plow, he thought. He glanced up but only saw headlights cresting the top of the hill and shining on the frost-covered tarmac as it headed down.
He eased his foot onto the brake until the Toyota bumper was practically touching the cream-colored Mercedes. He flashed his lights. The car didn’t move.
Chuck rolled the window down and craned his head into the frigid night air.
“Betty?” he cried.
Chuck honked the horn.
“Come on, you old biddy, move it,” he muttered. Exasperated, he put the car into park and reached down to unbuckle his seat belt.
Suddenly, he heard an engine rev high to his left and he
snapped his head over in horror. Two bright lights were bearing down on him from the hill road at an insane speed.
“Wh—” Chuck cried, pivoting away from the seat belt, his hand clawing for the door handle. He screamed as the lights grew bright and merged in his vision just before the vehicle slammed into his door with a concussive blast. The window blew out and the Toyota shot away, tumbling sideways, spraying antifreeze and shards of glass down Wellesley Avenue. The car completed three flips before the roof slammed into an oak tree bordering the street, and a shower of snow came down on its crumpled form as it rocked and then went still. Something whirred loudly in the engine block, the noise peaking and then beginning to fade. The gnarled roots of the oak were already speckled with blood, which glowed black in the moonlight.
Across from the oak tree was a gas station, closed for the evening. But lights went on in the low-slung house at the opposite corner.
The vehicle that had slammed into the Toyota was not a snowplow but an old Land Rover, blue. Its front end was crumpled, and the bumper was lying in the intersection of Wellesley and Willow in a V-shape. The engine was making a low grinding noise and steam drifted from its buckled hood. With no air bags in sight, a body was crushed against the driving wheel, its right shoulder brokenly sticking up.
The whirring from the Toyota stopped, but a green liquid was flowing from the engine and hissing when it hit the snow.
A door now slammed in the house opposite, and a man stood on the porch, staring at the crash, a phone in one hand and the other clutching a heavy coat around his belly. His voice rose a notch, and he pointed at the wreck as if the person on the other end could somehow see it.
Suddenly, the figure at the Land Rover’s wheel began to move. It seemed to pull its impaled chest and limbs away from the steer
ing wheel. As if it were testing the bones in its neck, it wrenched its head left, then right. It slumped back into the driver’s seat. Thirty seconds later, the driver’s door made a wrenching sound and popped open.
The man on the porch stopped speaking, and he held his hand out, as if to tell the Toyota’s driver—fifty yards away, still slumped against the blood-spattered seat—not to move, that an ambulance was on its way. The man turned back into the house. He was yelling into the phone for the ambulance to hurry.
When he was fully inside, an elderly male figure slowly stepped out of the Land Rover. Walter Prescott was dressed in what looked like a black plastic raincoat, his broken shoulder still stuck up, his left leg dragging as he moved toward the stalled cream-colored Mercedes. His hair was matted and askew, his spectral face crumpled in on the left side; his lips had been smashed against his teeth and were torn jaggedly in several places. But there was no blood on his face or on the black poncho. Prescott went around the back of the old diesel, pulled open the door, and stepped into the driver’s seat.
The Benz roared to life, then shifted into drive and moved off toward the Shan.
Behind him, Chuck Godwin was dead in the Toyota, his face awash in a combination of wiper fluid and arterial blood that was quickly drying in the frigid air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
J
ohn Bailey put down the phone and looked at the notes he’d made. If it was humanly possible, he now disliked the Margaret Post case more than he had five minutes ago. That was before he’d gotten on the phone with the military souvenirs guy. This was now Wednesday, a full week after the murder, and the case was beginning to eat at him.
He eyed the top of the page.
Marcus Wilbur.
Mr. Wilbur of Bethesda, Maryland, was the foremost expert on bayonets in the United States of America, apparently. One person who’d referred him to Marcus had actually called him “Mr. Bayonet.”
John sometimes wondered why he’d become a cop. It led him down to levels of human behavior that he had less and less interest in exploring. Forget exploring,
knowing about
. Not just the kiddie-porn freaks that he’d nabbed as part of Operation Protect Our Children a few years ago. The first time he’d gone swimming in his neighbor’s pool after those arrests, he’d hesitated. He’d hesitated to pick up his neighbor’s little girl, four-year-old Berenice, because he’d instantly thought of those grub worms he’d encountered during the sweep.
Now he knew there was a guy whose whole life was bayonets. And he’d had trouble getting Marcus Wilbur off the phone. Marcus was
fascinated
to know that a killer was using a bayonet with an inch-and-a-half-wide blade to kill women and to force old men to hang themselves in their backyards.
What John had learned from Mr. Bayonet was this: the
weapon used in Walter Prescott’s killing—and perhaps Margaret Post’s, too—was probably an antique. Mr. Bayonet had told him that bayonets did indeed have blood gutters, also called fullers or blood grooves, as Dr. Hobart had mentioned. John had tried to stop Marcus Wilbur from explaining the structure of a bayonet, because he had a vision of the bayonet entering Margaret’s chest just above the nipple and the thin gutter filling with her blood and then spilling over onto the broad shiny part of the blade. A bayonet with a blood groove was just as strong as one without one, Mr. Bayonet explained, but 25 percent lighter. When John Bailey didn’t immediately express astonishment, Mr. Bayonet had prompted him: “Isn’t that remarkable?”