Darkfall

Who is more foolish-

the child afraid of the dark

or the man afraid of the light?

— MAURICE FREEHILL

CHAPTER FOUR

I

At five-thirty, Jack and Rebecca went into Captain Walter Gresham's office to present him with the manpower and equipment requirements of the task force, as well as to discuss strategy in the investigation.

During the afternoon, two more members of the Carramazza crime family had been murdered, along with their bodyguards. Already the press was calling it the bloodiest gang war since Prohibition. What the press still didn't know was that the victims (except for the first two) had not been stabbed or shot or garroted or hung on meat hooks in traditional cosa nostra style. For the time being, the police had chosen not to reveal that all but the first two victims had been savagely bitten to death. When reporters uncovered that puzzling and grotesque fact, they would realize this was one of the biggest stories of the decade.

“That's when it'll get really bad,” Gresham said. “They'll be all over us like fleas on a dog.”

The heat was on, about to get even hotter, and Gresham was as fidgety as a toad on a griddle. Jack and Rebecca remained seated in front of the captain's desk, but Gresham couldn't remain still behind it. As they conducted their business, the captain paced the room, went repeatedly to the windows, lit a cigarette, smoked less than a third of it, stubbed it out, realized what he had done, and lit another.

Finally the time came for Jack to tell Gresham about his latest visit to Carver Hampton's shop and about the telephone call from Baba Lavelle. He had never felt more awkward than he did while recounting those events under Gresham's skeptical gaze.

He would have felt better if Rebecca had been on his side, but again they were in adversary positions. She was angry with him because he hadn't gotten back to the office until ten minutes past three, and she'd had to do a lot of the task force preparations on her own. He explained that the snowy streets were choked with crawling traffic, but she was having none of it. She listened to his story, was as angry as he was about the threat to his kids, but was not the least bit convinced that he had experienced anything even remotely supernatural. In fact, she was frustrated by his insistence that a great deal about the incident at the pay phone was just plain uncanny.

When Jack finished recounting those events for Gresham, the captain turned to Rebecca and said, “What do you make of it?”

She said, “I think we can now safely assume that Lavelle is a raving lunatic, not just another hood who wants to make a bundle in the drug trade. This isn't just a battle for territory within the underworld, and we'd be making a big mistake if we tried to handle it the same way we'd handle an honest-to-God gang war.”

“What else?” Gresham asked.

“Well,” she said. “I think we ought to dig into this Carver Hampton's background, see what we can turn up about him. Maybe he and Lavelle are in this together.”

“No,” Jack said. “Hampton wasn't faking when he told me he was terrified of Lavelle.”

“How did Lavelle know precisely the right moment to call that pay phone?” Rebecca asked. “How did he know exactly when you'd be passing by it? One answer is that he was in Hampton's shop the whole time you were there, in the back room, and he knew when you left.”

“He wasn't,” Jack said. “Hampton's just not that good an actor.”

“He's a clever fraud,” she said. “But even if he isn't tied to Lavelle, I think we ought to get men up to Harlem this evening and really scour the block with the pay phone… and the block across the intersection from it. If Lavelle wasn't in Hampton's shop, then he must have been watching it from one of the other buildings along that street. There's no other explanation.”

Unless maybe his voodoo really works, Jack thought.

Rebecca continued: “Have detectives check the apartments along those two blocks, see if Lavelle is holed up in one. Distribute copies of the photograph of Lavelle. Maybe someone up there's seen him around.”

“Sounds good to me,” Gresham said. “We'll do it.”

“And I believe the threat against Jack's kids ought to be taken seriously. Put a guard on them when Jack can't be there.”

“I agree,” Gresham said. “We'll assign a man right now.”

“Thanks, Captain,” Jack said. “But I think it can wait until morning. The kids are with my sister-in-law right now, and I don't think Lavelle could find them. I told her to make sure she wasn't being followed when she picked them up at school. Besides, Lavelle said he'd give me the rest of the day to make up my mind about backing off the voodoo angle, and I assume he meant this evening as well.”

Gresham sat on the edge of his desk. “If you want, I can remove you from the case. No sweat.”

“Absolutely not,” Jack said.

“You take his threat seriously?”

“Yes. But I also take my work seriously. I'm on this one to the bitter end.”

Gresham lit another cigarette, drew deeply on it. “Jack, do you actually think there could be anything to this voodoo stuff?”

Aware of Rebecca's penetrating stare, Jack said, “It's pretty wild to think maybe there could be something to it. But I just can't rule it out.”

“I can,” Rebecca said. “Lavelle might believe in it, but that doesn't make it real.”

“What about the condition of the bodies?” Jack asked.

“Obviously,” she said, “Lavelle's using trained animals.”

“That's almost as far-fetched as voodoo,” Gresham said.

“Anyway,” Jack said, “we went through all of that earlier today. About the only small, vicious, trainable animal we could think of was the ferret. And we've all seen Pathology's report, the one that came in at four-thirty. The teeth impressions don't belong to ferrets. According to Pathology, they don't belong to any other animal Noah took aboard the ark, either.”

Rebecca said, “Lavelle's from the Caribbean. Isn't it likely that he's using an animal indigenous to that part of the world, something our forensic experts wouldn't even think of, some species of exotic lizard or something like that?”

“Now you're grasping at straws,” Jack said.

“I agree,” Gresham said. “But it's worth checking out, anyway. Okay. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Can you explain how I knew that call from Lavelle was for me? Why was I drawn to that pay phone?”

Wind stroked the windows.

Behind Gresham's desk, the ticking of the wall clock sudddenly seemed much louder than it had been.

The captain shrugged. “I guess neither of us has an answer for you, Jack.”

“Don't feel bad. I don't have an answer for me, either.”

Gresham got up from his desk. “All right, if that's it, then I think the two of you ought to knock off, go home, get some rest. You've put in a long day already; the task force is functioning now, and it can get along without you until tomorrow. Jack, if you'll hang around just a couple of minutes, I'll show you a list of the available officers on every shift, and you can handpick the men you want to watch your kids.”