After another step I realized that he too was dead, a dark red ribbon of blood encircling his throat, his body crumpled against the wall where he was slain. As I extended my hand to check for a pulse, the Ripper Gallery door swung open and crashed into me. My gun went off with earsplitting intensity right beside my face, the blast echoing with a tremendous boom, reverberating down the entire length of the alley.
A hand grabbed my wrist and shoved the Luger into the brick wall behind me, sending the gun clattering to the cobblestone. Almost as quickly, a punch landed in my stomach, and I felt two hands pick me up by the front of my shirt and slam me backwards into the brick wall. An intense pain shot up my side. I realized in a split second that my still-stitched knife wound had reopened. I struggled to turn and face my attacker, but his face was lost in the shadows above me.
I felt hot breath on my face and a sick minty smell in my nostrils.
“Welcome, Madden,” the voice said in a hushed whisper, then pushed me backwards so that I slumped halfway inside the doorway to the gallery, then fell onto my back on the floor. The voice continued. “Our work is almost complete.”
The shadow loomed above me and I felt something unbearably cold at my neck and realized he held the blade of a knife against my throat. With every ounce of energy, I thrust upward with my right foot and caught my attacker in the solar plexus, even as he hunched above me for the kill. I drove it with all my might and felt his body lurch skyward and backwards, even as the air rushed from his body amidst a grunt of pain.
He landed and stumbled backwards, gasping, as sirens suddenly sounded in the distance. I grabbed his right wrist with both hands in an attempt to control his knife hand.
Suddenly fireworks of green and yellow stars filled my entire field of vision as an intense pain in my side exploded into my brain. I was only barely able to assimilate that my opponent had taken his free left hand and worked two fingers into my back, pressing relentlessly into the recent knife wound. The whispering voice breathed in my ear. “Enjoy the exhibit. I’m not finished with you yet, Madden.”
I reached out for my assailant through the fireworks exploding before me, but grasped only air. The figure retreated into the gallery, vanishing amidst the vibrant, multicolor spectacular that continued to plague my sense of sight. His footsteps became echoing clacks that eventually dissolved into the night, and the only sounds left were the approaching sirens.
I pulled myself to the doorway of the gallery and tried to stand but fell backwards. From my prone position I saw a strange rectangular shape before me, illuminated by brief flashes of lightning. As the fireworks receded from my vision, I rolled over, found my Luger, stood, and stumbled forward to investigate.
The rectangle floating in midair was simply a placard on a tripod, inviting the public to an art exhibit bearing a strangely familiar name, but one that I couldn’t place: The Devil’s Orchard.
I stepped inside, holding the Luger unsteadily in front of me in one hand, my flashlight in the other. The interior of the gallery revealed an expansive single room with a hardwood floor. My shoes clomped against the smooth surface and my footsteps echoed in the dark interior. I focused my flashlight on the far wall. No sign of my adversary. The sirens grew louder in the distance, but were still several blocks away.
I turned my attention back to the wall and the flashlight illuminated a series of paintings before me. I swept the light across the gallery floor, surveying the entire room. There were no stairs leading to an upper level, and the ceilings extended a good thirty feet into the air. There were two doors, the one through which I’d entered, and one in the rear corner, only partially closed.
I walked toward the rear door but the paintings on the wall drew my attention. The fading circular light of my flashlight bounced along the dark walls. The paintings in the shadows were dark, mostly black, but with splashes of color: red.
The images became more discernible as I approached. The first painting on my right was of a young woman, her eyes rolling back into her head, surrounded by stars similar to the great glowing orbs of van Gogh’s
Starry Night.
The girl in the painting threw her head back, her eyebrows arched in fury and helplessness. Her face bore the depiction of suffering.
I stepped closer and blinked. Small red lines on her forehead formed the letter
A.
And then I realized I was looking at a painted image of the once-living Anna Cross. The world around me became surreal as I stared at a portrait of the Snow White Killer’s first victim, captured in the very moment of her death.
In disbelief, I cut my eyes to the next painting. Another woman, with the red letters
T, A,
and
N
adorning her forehead, grimacing as if to shield herself from an attack, a bloody knife in the foreground of the painting, wielded from a first-person perspective this time, poised in midslash. From this portrait the terrified eyes of Jessica Harrison, the killer’s second victim, stared back at me.
The room tilted before me. I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t get my mind around it. I stumbled forward to the next painting, a young brunette with a beautiful pale complexion.
I felt sick to my stomach as I realized I’d discovered a gallery of all the dead girls left by this killer, all staring silently ahead, young women all failed by me.
I noticed for the first time, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the gallery, that it wasn’t completely dark inside. In the rear, next to the other door, a decently lit painting sat on its own, not surrounded by other portraits. A series of muted exhibition lights sat poised around it, illuminating it in garish fashion.
It was the indubitable centerpiece of the exhibit, but I couldn’t make it out.
I walked toward it, the Luger hanging limply at my side, my wingtips slowly trudging the floor in zombielike thunks. The pain in my back and side grew worse with each step.
For some reason I was afraid of what lay ahead. The hair on my neck stood up, a preternatural warning telling me to leave, but there was no going back.
The painting, even from far away, seemed somehow strangely
familiar.
The repetitive wash of d
é
j
à
vu flowing over me felt like walking into an ocean of memories, each wave a little more familiar than the next, but still unrecognizable. The painting depicted a landscape I’d seen before. Trees in this painting, unlike the others, as more and more of the picture came into view.
The artistic style in this painting was different from the rest as well. A little more crude, not as well defined as the others, perhaps. It came into view as my flashlight bobbed in the dark toward it.
I kept walking slowly closer, unable to stop myself, to get a better look at the dark canvas.
Trees, branches. A young boy’s smudged white face in the background in the lower left-hand corner, in front of the main figure in the center of the painting, still covered in shadows. A boy with cuts on his body, a torn T-shirt. A boy? A blurry-faced boy I somehow recognized. From where?
The boy in the painting held the hand of a woman behind him, the central figure. As I approached, the shadows and light shifted to reveal the painting in greater detail. The young woman followed the boy, holding her free hand above her head to keep tree branches out of her face. The sleeve of her white blouse partly obscured her face, which finally came into view.
At that moment I heard Woodson’s voice suddenly echo behind me in the gallery, calling for me, screaming for me to answer. I felt the vibrations of many footsteps scuttling across the hardwood floor toward me, but I couldn’t hear what Woodson was saying.
I took a last look at the painting.
Right before the room went black, I registered that somehow, impossibly, confusingly … the eyes of my
very own mother
stared back at me from the painting, her frightened face surrounded by the dark and twisted orchard in which she had died alone more than twenty years before.
Eventually Woodson’s face emerged from the darkness.
I tried to rise, but couldn’t, as a boom of thunder broke in the distance. I focused on Woodson above me, whose concerned expression seemed consistent with the urgency in her voice. “Lucas. Wake up. Are you okay? Wake up.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “Guys, he’s waking up over here. Lend a hand, please?” She turned back to me. “Just stay still, Lucas. You passed out in here. You lost a lot of blood.” She pulled my shirt up and away from my chest.
I looked down to find my torso wrapped in fresh white gauze, an irregular red stain spreading from my back to an area behind my left rib cage. “That’s just the old cut, reopened,” I murmured.
“Who did this?”
I looked past Woodson and observed my surroundings. We were still inside the dark gallery into which I’d tracked the SWK. The interior was now lit by a series of crime scene lights, and multiple silhouetted figures moved in the darkness. CSIs, I finally realized.
“Who did this, Lucas?” she repeated.
“It was him, Woodson. The Snow White Killer. I’m sure of it.”
“So did you get a good look at him?” From the lack of surprise in her voice, I realized Woodson had already put two and two together.
I shook my head. “No. He surprised me. He was waiting for me in here.”
“Lucas,” Woodson ventured her next question gingerly, “did you happen to look around inside the gallery yet, by the way?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
She blew the hair out of her face. “I was afraid of that,” she said, and cradled my head in her lap and kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry, Lucas.”
I started to speak, but Woodson pulled out a small cylinder with a handle and pointed it toward me. “Hold on. Before you go anywhere. If you fought him, you might have caught a little piece of him. Don’t move until I roll you with a lint roller to find out if Mr. SWK actually left any trace evidence on you during the fight.”
“Lots of luck,” I said, but lay still as Woodson went to work. We both fell silent as I rested my head on her legs and she rolled the tape roller slowly over my shirt, along my collar, and over my chest without speaking. I felt strangely comforted, if only momentarily, amidst the bustling crime scene investigation in full swing around us.
“Okay,” she said after she finished, “let’s hope we find something.” She unrolled the piece of tape from the roller and placed it into a small brown paper bag, which she then placed into a briefcase beside her. She gently stood, guiding my head from her lap to the floor, and then offered her hand to help me up. “Come on, let’s get you to a hospital.”
“No way, Woodson. I’m staying here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m staying here.”
Woodson sighed. “Okay, we’ll see about that. Let’s see if you can even stand up first.”
I took her hand. The room swam before me, but it quickly went away and left in its wake a pounding headache instead. “Damn it.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”
“I’m sure. What have we got?” I asked, lifting my head and looking around the gallery. I had to steady my forehead with the first two fingers of my left hand to keep it upraised despite the pain.
“Nothing but paintings.”
“Did they use UV lights yet?”
“Yeah. No blood in here, Lucas. Except the blood on you. All of which appears to be yours, which is why you should be going to the hospital and—”
“So this is just an art gallery?”
Woodson sighed in resigned fashion, apparently accepting that I wouldn’t be going to a hospital as long as I had anything to do about it. “Yes, seems to be just an art gallery, no other sort of purpose by day.”
“I want to have a look at that painting again. The one of my mother.”
Woodson held out her hand and touched my shoulder. “Are you sure? What good will it do?”
“I want to see it again, see if there’s anything that might give us a clue.” I started to walk back toward the rear of the gallery when my cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Lucas. It’s Terry. You got a second?”
Woodson looked at me with a question on her face as I answered aloud for her benefit. “Not really, Terry. What’s on your mind?”
“You sound like shit.”
“Is that why you called?”
“No, just an observation. The real reason was to let you know we’re starting the sequencing reactions to amplify ripper genes from the victim DNA samples. Thought you might want to be here when we finish sequencing the genes tomorrow morning. We’re a little ahead of schedule.”
“Okay. Any progress on separating the caffeine and the pseudocaffeine?”
“Yeah, a little. We’ve extracted it, so we should be able to run it tomorrow and get an ID.” He paused. “So what’s going on down there? Alan just mentioned you guys found another victim?”
“Yeah, and this girl had a lot of blood beneath her fingernails. A lot, Terry. Maybe finally one of the victims had a chance to fight back. We can check whether the samples beneath this last victim’s fingernails match the blood in the messages on the victims’ foreheads.”
Terry replied, but I didn’t hear. All of a sudden I saw two versions of Woodson looking back at me. A sound like the ocean crashed in my head as I began to sway back and forth. “Yeah. Terry, sorry, listen I gotta go,” I managed to say, just before one of the Woodson twins reached for me and yelled my name. Then everything faded away to the increasingly familiar black.
* * *
“Lucas,” the voice said.
Woodson stared down at me once again. Just one Woodson this time.
“Where am I now?”
“You’re in my house.”
“Why?”
“You fainted at the gallery, but I managed to catch you before you hit the floor. Not the world’s most graceful catch, but I managed to keep you from hurting your head. I took you to the hospital, but your MRI was negative. You don’t remember? You woke up in the middle of it and demanded that you be taken back to the crime scene. You wouldn’t shut up. Mercifully for me, they finally deemed you well enough to receive a sedative. They gave you fluids and stitched you up in the ER and sent us on our way.”