What the Night Knows (3 page)

“
Who is dead, sir?
”

“
My mother, father, grandmother. My sister.
”

“
Who is this?
”

“
Billy Lucas. I’m fourteen.
”

“
What’s your address there?
”

“
You know it already. It came up on your screen when I called.
”

“
Have you checked them for signs of life?
”

“
Yes, I checked them very closely for signs of life.
”

“
Have you had any first-aid training?
”

“
Trust me, they’re dead. I killed them. I killed them hard.
”

“
You killed them? Son, if this is a prank—
”

“
This isn’t a prank. The prank is over. I pranked them all. I pranked them good. Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing. Good-bye now. I’ll be waiting for you on the front porch.
”

Along the county road came two vehicles behind headlights. Seen through the smeared and misted windows, through the deluge, they had little detail and resembled bathyscaphes motoring through an oceanic trench.

As John watched the traffic pass, the puddled blacktop blazing in their beams, bright reflections coruscating along his streaming windows, the afternoon was further distorted and made strange. He was plagued by confusion, disconcerted to find himself—a man of reason—wandering in a fog of superstition.

He felt adrift in space and time, memory as valid as the moment.

Twenty years earlier and half a continent from here, four people had been murdered in their home. The Valdane family.

They had lived less than a third of a mile from the house in which John Calvino was raised. He knew them all. He went to school with Darcy Valdane and nursed a secret crush on her. He’d been fourteen at the time.

Elizabeth Valdane, the mother, was stabbed with a butcher knife. Like Sandra Lucas, Billy’s mother, Elizabeth had been found dead in her kitchen. Both women were wheelchair-bound.

Elizabeth’s husband, Anthony Valdane, was brutally bludgeoned with a hammer. The killer left the claw end of the implement embedded in the victim’s shattered skull—as Billy, too, had left the hammer in his father’s head.

Anthony had been attacked while sitting at the workbench in his garage; Robert Lucas had been clubbed to death in his study. As the hammer arced down, Anthony was building a birdhouse; Robert was writing a check to the electric company. Birds went homeless, bills went unpaid.

Victoria, Elizabeth Valdane’s sister, a widow who lived with them, had been punched in the face and strangled with a red silk scarf. Ann Lucas, Billy’s grandmother, a recent widow, was punched and subsequently strangled with such ferocity that the scarf—red this time, too—cut deep into her throat. The women’s relationships to their families were not identical, but eerily similar.

Fifteen-year-old Darcy Valdane endured rape before being stabbed to death with the same butcher knife used on her mother. Twenty years later, Celine Lucas, sixteen, was raped—and then butchered with the same blade used on
her
mother.

Darcy had suffered nine knife wounds. Celine, too, was stabbed nine times.

Then I stabbed her precisely nine times.…

Why did you say “precisely”?

Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine
.

In both cases, the order of the murders was the same: mother, father, widowed aunt/grandmother, and finally the daughter.

John Calvino’s laptop directory contained a document titled “Then-Now,” which he had composed over the past few days, listing the similarities between the Valdane-family and the Lucas-family murders. He didn’t need to bring it to the screen, for he had committed it to memory.

A flatbed truck, transporting a large and arcane piece of farm machinery, roared past, casting up a spray of dirty water. In the murky light, the machine looked insectile and prehistoric, furthering the quality of unreality that characterized this drowned afternoon.

Cocooned in his car, as wind ceaselessly spun filaments of rain around it, John considered the faces of two murderers that phased like moons through his mind’s eye.

The Lucas family had been destroyed by one of their own, by handsome blue-eyed Billy, honor student and choirboy, his features smooth and innocent.

The Valdanes, who had no son, were murdered by an intruder whose looks were less appealing than those of Billy Lucas.

That long-ago killer had committed additional atrocities against three other families in the months that followed the Valdane murders. During the last of those crimes, he’d been shot to death.

The journal that he left behind, hundreds of handwritten pages, suggested that he had killed often prior to the Valdanes, generally
one victim at a time. He didn’t name them or say where those murders were committed. He didn’t care to brag—until he started to kill entire families and felt that his work was then worthy of admiration. Aside from the story of his detestable origins, the journal consisted mostly of a demented philosophical ramble about death with a lowercase
d
and about what it was like to be Death with an uppercase
D
. He believed he had become “an immortal aspect” of the grim reaper.

His true name was Alton Turner Blackwood. He had lived under the false name Asmodeus. Itinerant, he had traveled ceaselessly in a series of stolen vehicles or hobo-style in boxcars, or sometimes as a ticketed passenger on buses. A vagrant, he slept in whatever vehicle he currently possessed, in abandoned buildings, in homeless shelters, in culverts and under bridges, in the backseats of twisted wrecks in automobile junkyards, in any shed left unlocked, once in an open grave covered by a canopy raised for a morning burial service, and secretly in church basements.

He stood six feet five, scarecrow-thin but strong. His hands were immense, the spatulate fingers as suctorial as the toe discs of a web-foot toad. Large bony wrists like robot joints, orangutan-long arms. His shoulder blades were thick and malformed, so that bat wings appeared to be furled under his shirt.

After each of the first three families had been savaged, Alton Blackwood had rung 911, not from the site of the murders, but from a public phone. His vanity required that the bodies be found while they were fresh, before the flamboyant process of decomposition upstaged his handiwork.

Blackwood was long dead, the four cases were closed, and the crimes occurred in a small city with inadequate protocols for the archiving of 911 calls. Of the three messages the killer had left, only one remained, regarding the second family, the Sollenburgs.

The previous day, John had solicited a copy of the recording, ostensibly as part of the Lucas investigation, and had received it by email as an MP3 file. He had loaded it into his laptop. Now he played it again.

When Blackwood spoke in an ordinary volume, his voice was a rat-tail file rasping against a bar of brass, but in the 911 calls, he spoke sotto voce, evidently to foil identification. His whisper sounded like an utterance by the progeny of snake and rat.

“
I killed the Sollenburg family. Go to 866 Brandywine Lane.
”

“
Speak up please. Say again.
”

“
I’m the same artist who did the Valdane family.
”

“
I’m sorry. I’m not hearing you clearly.
”

“
You can’t keep me on the line long enough to find me.
”

“
Sir, if you could speak up—
”

“
Go see what I’ve done. It’s a beautiful thing.
”

In
his
911 call, Billy Lucas had said,
Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing
.

To any police detective, the similarities between these two crimes, committed twenty years apart, would suggest that Billy Lucas read about Alton Turner Blackwood’s murder spree and imitated it as an homage to the killer.

But Billy had not mentioned Blackwood. Billy said not one word about his inspiration. Of motive, he said only
Ruin
.

Thunder came and went, thunder with lightning and without. A few cars and trucks seemed to float past as if awash in a flood.

The state hospital was an hour’s drive from the city, where John
lived and where he had an appointment to keep before he went home. He powered the driver’s seat forward, switched on the windshield wipers, released the hand brake, and put the Ford in gear.

He didn’t want to think what he was thinking, but the thought was a sentinel voice that would not be silenced. His wife and his children were in grave danger from someone, something.

His family and two others before it were at risk, and he did not know if he could save any of them.

5

USING TWO SPOONS, MARION DUNNAWAY SCOOPED DOUGH from the steel mixing bowl, deftly shaped it into a ball, and deposited it on the baking sheet, where eight others were arranged in rows.

“If I’d ever had children and now had grandchildren, I’d never let them near the Internet unless I was sitting beside them.”

She kept a tidy kitchen. Yellow-and-white curtains framed a view of the storm and seemed to bring order even to the chaotic weather.

“There’s too much sick stuff too easily accessed. If they see it when they’re young, the seed of an obsession might be planted.”

She scooped up more dough, spoon clicked against spoon, and a tenth cookie-to-be appeared almost magically on the Teflon sheet.

Marion had retired from the army after serving thirty-six years as a surgical nurse. Short, compact, sturdy, she radiated competence. Her strong hands attended to every task with brisk efficiency.

“Say a boy is just twelve when he comes across such trash. The mind of a twelve-year-old is highly fertile soil, Detective Calvino.”

“Highly,” John agreed from his chair at the dinette table.

“Any seed planted in it is likely to thrive, which is why you have to guard against an ill wind that might blow in a weed pip.”

Under a helmet of thick white hair, Marion’s face was that of a fifty-year-old, though she was sixty-eight. Her smile was sweet, and John suspected her laugh would be hearty, though he doubted that he would ever hear it.

Warming his hands around his coffee mug, he said, “You think that’s what happened to Billy—some weed pip from the Internet?”

Having pressed an eleventh ball of dough to the baking sheet, she said nothing as she shaped the final cookie in the batch.

Then she raised her face to the window, staring toward the house next door. John assumed she was seeing beyond that place, imagining the house two doors away—the Lucas residence, the house of death.

“Damned if I know. They were a solid family. Good people. Billy was always polite. The nicest boy. So very considerate of his mother after the accident that put her in the wheelchair.”

She opened the oven. With a quilted mitt, she took out a tray of finished cookies and put it on the sinkside cutting board to cool.

A flood of hot air poured the aromas of chocolate and coconut and pecans through the kitchen. Curiously, instead of making John’s mouth water, the smell briefly nauseated him.

Marion said, “I served in field hospitals, battle zones. Front-line emergency surgeries. Saw a lot of violence, too much death.”

She slid the tray of neatly arranged dough balls into the oven, closed the door, and took off the quilted mitt.

“I got so I could tell at first sight which ones would survive their wounds, which wouldn’t. I could see death in their faces.”

From a drawer near the refrigerator, she extracted a key and brought it to the table.

“I never saw death in Billy. Not a glimpse of it. The Internet theory is just twiddle-twaddle, Detective Calvino. Just the jabber of an old woman who’s afraid to admit some evil can’t be explained.”

She gave him the key, which dangled from a beaded chain with a plastic cat charm. The cat was a grinning golden tabby.

Billy’s parents loved cats. They’d had two spayed British spotted shorthairs, green-eyed and frisky, named Posh and Fluff.

When the killing started, Posh and Fluff fled through a cat flap in the kitchen door. A neighbor, at the house across the street from the Lucases, found them shivering and crying under his back porch.

Pocketing the key, John rose. “Thank you for the coffee, ma’am.”

“I should have thought to turn the key in the day it happened.”

“No harm done,” he assured her.

Wondering if the Lucases might have traded house keys with a trusted neighbor, John had that morning made four cold calls before hearing what he hoped to hear from Marion Dunnaway.

“Let me give you some cookies for those kids you mentioned,” she said. “The earlier batches are cool.”

He sensed that he would disappoint her if he declined.

She put six cookies in a OneZip bag and escorted John to the front door. “I think of going up there to see Billy one day, if he’s allowed visitors. But what would I say?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing to say. You’re better off remembering him as he was. He’s very different now. You can do nothing for him.”

He had left his raincoat on the front-porch swing. He shrugged into it, put up the hood, went to his car at the curb, and drove two doors east to the Lucas house, where he parked in the driveway.

Perhaps an hour of daylight remained before the rain washed darkness down the day.

Fat snails, with eye stalks questing, crossed the wet front walkway, venturing from one grassy realm to another. John avoided crushing them underfoot.

To accommodate Sandra Lucas in her wheelchair, the porch offered both steps and a ramp.