The Killing Room (16 page)

It was warm enough so that Ruby did not yet have to worry
about the boy catching his death of cold. In those next months they moved at night, taking refuge in daylight.

Before long they would come to know the darkness.

By the time the boy was three, Ruby had flowered. They had been taken in by people they met along the roads. For nearly two years she and the boy were the boarders of a man and woman who ran a general store in southwestern Pennsylvania. One of her employers along the way was a small community college in Ohio, and Ruby, sleeping only a few hours a night, would wander the stacks of books in the library. She spent a good deal of time gathering food scraps from the cafeteria, but most of her free time she would spend in the library, reading everything she could. She discovered early that she had a facility for memory. She read to the boy from the time he was six months old.

A year later she saw the man at a diner in Romansville, Pennsylvania. Ruby and the boy were staying at a bed and breakfast where Ruby was performing housekeeping chores in exchange for room and board.

He had gotten heavier, the flesh of his neck grown flabby. His shoulders had acquired a weight that only time and sadness could build. But there was no mistaking him. When Ruby and the boy approached the booth, Carson Tatum looked up. For a moment he looked as if he had seen ghosts. Then his face softened, and he was Carson again.

They got their pleasantries out of the way.

‘Let me look at you,’ he said. ‘You are a sight, Ruby Longstreet.’ He reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder. ‘And your boy is quite the man.’

‘He is my joy,’ Ruby said. ‘Is the caravan nearby?’

Carson nodded. ‘Just over in Parkesburg,’ he said. ‘It’s just down to the Preacher and three others now.’

Three others
, Ruby thought. She said nothing.

Carson stirred his coffee for the longest time, even though there wasn’t but an inch in the cup, and probably cold at that. ‘It was wrong what he done,’ Carson finally said. ‘Just wrong.’

Ruby had no reply to this. None that she would say.

Carson looked over his shoulder, then back at Ruby. ‘The Preacher has thrown in with a traveling midway. It’s the only way he can draw people anymore. I want you and the boy to come this afternoon.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a pair of billets, along with a tight spool of red ride tickets. ‘You come about three o’clock. I’m going to have something for you.’

‘Something from the Preacher?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Ruby chose her words with care. ‘There’s something else I need you to get from him,’ she said. ‘If he’s still got it. Can you do that for me?’

Carson Tatum just smiled.

The carnival was small, worn out. It smelled of axle grease and spun sugar and despair. Whatever it had once been, it was no longer. In fact, it was not much of a midway at all. There was a small Ferris wheel, a carousel with painted horses, a track with only four little cars, along with the usual games of chance. There were a half-dozen food stands offering elephant ears, funnel cakes, caramel apples. Fireworks were promised.

Ruby had been here before. She knew this the moment she stepped onto the field, and the knowledge electrified her senses.

She had been here in her dreams.

Ruby took the boy by the hand, gave the man at the front booth their tickets. She looked to the edge of the field and, as expected, saw the black dogs. She had long ago stopped trying to tell which dogs were which. Ruby figured they were probably on their fourth or fifth litter. But there were always two. And they were always near.

At three o’clock she saw Carson standing by the carousel. Ruby and the boy walked over. Carson took them behind one of the stands.

‘Big news. He’s about to pack it in,’ Carson said of the Preacher. ‘I just heard that he is going to go to –’

Philadelphia
, Ruby thought.

‘– Philadelphia,’ Carson said. ‘He lived there at one time, you know.’

Ruby knew. She had read the Preacher’s book. When the Preacher’s mama left Jubal Hannah, and moved to North Philadelphia, the Preacher was only four.

Ruby knew the past, just as she could see the future in her dreams. She saw her son grown tall and strong and wise. She saw him silhouetted against the waters of the Delaware River, at long last free from the devil within him.

‘Preacher said he’s gonna start a mission up to Philadelphia,’ Carson continued. ‘A storefront church of sorts. Maybe a second-hand store.’

This was in her dreams, too.

‘Did you get what I asked?’ Ruby asked.

‘Yes, missy. I sure did.’

Carson looked around, reached into his coat, took out a thick paper bag. He handed it to Ruby.

‘Let him think it was me,’ Carson said.

Ruby hefted the sack. It was much heavier than she thought it was going to be. ‘What else is
in
here?’

When Ruby peeked inside she almost fainted. In addition to what she asked Carson to get for her there was a fat wad of money.

‘There should be forty thousand there,’ Carson said. ‘You take it and go make a life.’

Ruby forced down her sense of shock, hugged Carson long and hard and tearfully, watched him walk away. He had developed a limp on the right side. An affliction, she imagined, from all the heavy lifting he had done for the Preacher.

When Ruby paid her two spool tickets for the carousel, and she and the boy stepped on the platform, she saw Abigail and Peter for the first time in years. How big they had grown. Her heart ached with their nearness. She wanted to throw her arms around them like she had when they were small. She couldn’t.

A few minutes later she saw the Preacher. Despite his troubles and the intervening years he still looked beautiful. Ruby reckoned she would have seen him this way no matter what he did to her.

He did not see her.

The Preacher put Abigail and Peter on horses. It all seemed to happen in slow motion, as Ruby imagined it had for St John.

The Preacher chose a white horse for Peter, a red one for Abigail. The two children were fraternal twins, but now they looked a great deal alike, as if they were identical.

Ruby then saw the Preacher put a small boy on a black horse. Ruby did not have to wonder whose child this was. The
boy looked just like the teenaged girl standing by the cotton candy stand, the thin, nerve-jangled girl named Bethany, the girl who had come after Ruby. Ruby wondered how many girls there had been since.

Ruby helped her boy onto the horse directly across from where the Preacher stood. This horse was old, unpainted. Its eyes were a faded gray, but most surely had one time been a coal black, as black as the dogs that were always near.

The carousel began to turn; the throaty old calliope played its song. Ruby looked at her boy, imagined him years from then, saw in her mind’s eye a time when he would be powerful, unstoppable.

The Preacher, just a few feet away, had no premonition, even though the signs were clear and unambiguous.

Weren’t they?

Or maybe the signs
would
have been clear if the Preacher had truly been anointed. For Ruby, the moment was preordained, and spoken of in the Word.

And I saw, and behold, a white horse.

Peter began to laugh as the carousel picked up speed, his white horse moving up and down to the rhythm.

I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come!’ And out came another horse, bright red.

Little Abigail, so much like her brother, began to laugh, too. She held tight to her red horse.

I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw, and behold, a black horse.

The boy on the black horse was scared. The Preacher held him with his free hand.

Faster and faster they went, the sound of the pipe organ filling Ruby’s mind like a sermon. She looked at her boy. He seemed to know where he was, what it all meant. Ruby clutched the money close to her, and knew they would leave this night, never to return, just as she knew they would all meet again, in the city of two rivers. In Philadelphia.

And there would be a reckoning.

As Ruby held tight to the pole, she ran her hands over the smooth, unpainted surface of the carousel horse. She imagined, as she always had, that this horse had at one time been a lustrous roan. Now it seemed to be translucent. She could almost hear its heartbeat within.

I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him.

In the months following that day the boy became very ill with tuberculosis, almost unknown in the modern world, but all too common among Ruby’s kind. She sat with him, night after night, a cloth over her mouth, the boy’s terrible rasping filling her nights.

One night, just outside the clinic in Doylestown, in the third month of the boy’s affliction, the two black dogs came and sat next to her. All night she patted their heads. In that night she had terrible dreams, dreams of men wrapped in barb wire, old men filled with stones. When she awoke to a white, healing light, the dogs were gone.

She went rushing into the clinic, mad with worry. They told her that, somehow, her boy had been healed.

They said it was a miracle.

*

Ruby grew to become a slender, beautiful young woman, and her charms were not lost on any man. She learned to use her wiles, borrowing many of the techniques of persuasion she had learned from the Preacher himself. She invested the money Carson Tatum had given her wisely, saving every penny she could, reading every book she could borrow.

One day she read in the newspapers of how the Preacher had proven himself to be the devil’s minion, how he had become a man who took souls unto himself, a man who did murder to avenge the loss of his stepsister Charlotte.

When Ruby learned of these dark deeds she knew the end days had begun.

On the day of the third church, Ruby – who had long since been known by another name, who had long ago forsaken her red hair – went to a street in North Philadelphia.

And Hades followed him.

They stood on the corner, across from the cathedral, watching. The people of the city milled around them, each parson to his tabernacle, each sinner to his deeds.

Mother and child
, Ruby thought.

There are seven churches in all.

FIFTEEN

Jessica stared at the phone, willing it to ring. This had never worked in the past, but that did not stop her from the practice.

Long after the baby’s body had been removed from the basement and the church had been sealed as a crime scene, long after the CSU officers had collected their evidence, Jessica and Byrne had stayed behind, not a single word passing between them for what seemed an eternity.

The two detectives ‘walked the scene,’ recreating, in their view, what might have happened. They examined the point of entry, envisioned the route the killer had taken. Jessica knew this was a different exercise for her partner than it was for her. She had never known anyone more compassionate than Kevin Byrne, but she knew that
he
knew what the experience of finding a dead – murdered was the right word – newborn baby must mean to her, to any mother.

After thirty minutes of silence, the solitude of the old stone church became oppressive.

‘Talk me out of thinking this is a homicide,’ Jessica finally said.

‘I wish I could, Jess.’

‘Tell me a story about how some mother was giving her little baby girl a bath, something terrible happened to the mother, and the baby just accidentally drowned in that tub.’

Byrne said nothing.

‘Tell me it was just an accident, and the mother – let’s assume she’s some religious nut job, just for the sake of argument – took the baby, her
beloved
baby, down to this church and tried to baptize the child, and something went terribly wrong.’

Jessica walked the aisle, up the three steps to where the altar once was, back down, over to the steps leading to the basement.

‘I need to think this was not a deliberate act, Kevin. I need to think this is not part of some plan, and that we’re never going to see this again. Ever.’

Byrne didn’t say anything. Jessica hadn’t really expected him to.

In front of the church, on the lamppost, they found another
X
.

Eventually they went off duty that day, Byrne to his life, Jessica to hers. Jessica hugged her children a dozen times that night, sat up all night in the hallway between their two rooms, checking on them every ten minutes, finally falling asleep a half-hour before the alarm clock rang.

Two days later the hot rage that had burned inside became something else, a feeling she’d had only a few times as a
police officer. She had taken every case she’d ever been assigned as a homicide detective seriously, and had the utmost respect for the dead, even if the victim was a despicable person. Every detective Jessica knew felt the same way. But there were cases that put you to bed, woke you up, ate with you, and walked with you. There were cases that took showers with you, went shopping with you, and sat with you in a movie theater. You never escaped their scrutiny, until they were closed.

This was one of those cases.

She knew that there was a process – not to mention a backlog – that was in place when it came to forensics. Blood typing, fingerprint identification, hair and fiber, DNA testing. These things took time.

Jessica knew all this and it still didn’t stop her from calling the lab every hour on the hour. She had not slept twenty minutes straight since leaving that church.

Those tiny fingers and toes.
Every time the image crossed her mind she felt the anger and fury begin to surge.

It was far from the first dead body she had ever seen, of course. It was far from the first dead
infant
she had ever seen. You work homicide in a place like Philadelphia and there is no confirmation of man’s inhumanity that shocks or surprises.

It was the
way
they had found the baby. The flawless preservation in that frozen block of ice. It was as if the baby would remain a child eternally, forever stalled mid-breath, eyes open. Perfect, crystal blue eyes.