Nocturnal: A Novel

An ambulance sat silently. Its lights were off. The paramedics just stood there.

Cops were everywhere, and they all knew they were too late.

Bryan sensed the tone: angry, somber, vengeful. Bobby Pigeon was dead. Every cop here, Bryan included, wanted to find the bastard responsible and make him pay.

Pookie parked. Bryan got out. He and Pookie ducked under yellow police tape and approached the house.

Only minutes earlier, most likely, the area had been a flurry of activity bordering on chaos. When the call for officer down had gone out, every cop within twenty blocks had stormed in. Stephen Koening and Ball-Puller Boyd had been the first homicide cops to arrive. They were running the scene.

Bryan and Pookie started up the seven concrete steps. Atop the steps, there were three doors side by side; the one on the left hung open. Ball-Puller Boyd was standing in the doorway, phone pressed to ear. He saw them coming, then quickly finished his call and put the phone in his pocket.

“Clauser, Chang,” he said. “Koening and I got this one. He’s inside with the CSI guys. What’s your role here?”

“We had the Oscar Woody case,” Pookie said. “I’m guessing Sharrow will put us back on it again, considering. Verde was here because the Deprovdechuk kid might be involved. We’ll stay out of your way while you look for Birdman’s killer, and we’ll feed you whatever we find.”

Boyd nodded. “Works for me until we hear different from Sharrow. The kid’s room is the last one on the left. Okay, here’s what we’ve got so far. Birdman’s sidearm is unaccounted for. Verde said Birdman got off two rounds, and we found two forty-caliber shell casings. We found one bullet in the wall. It went through the perp and into a picture frame. No trace of the other bullet — I hope it’s still in the fucker.”

Bryan hoped so, too. It would be fitting if Bobby managed to kill his own killer.

“How about a description?” Bryan said. “Verde get a good look?”

Ball-Puller stroked his walrus mustache. “Yeah. Six feet plus, long black beard, big gut, white wife-beater, jeans, boots. Might be carrying a hatchet, and/or Birdman’s Sig Sauer. We’ve got a BOLO out on that description, plus one for the Deprovdechuk kid. Looks like the kid strangled his mother with a belt sometime yesterday. His picture is already all over the news. We’ll get him.”

Pookie nodded. “How’s Verde?”

“Alive and uninjured,” Boyd said. “Other than that, not good.”

Rich Verde had failed to protect his partner. Right now, he’d be feeling guilty and worthless, like any cop would feel in the same situation.

Boyd reached into his pocket for his phone. “If you guys want to take a look, make it fast. Robertson is on the way, I don’t want the house full of feet and fingers when he gets here.”

He stepped aside and started dialing. Bryan and Pookie walked in.

Bryan smelled death. Faint and growing, but he knew it was a human corpse.

Far down the hallway, just past an open door, Bobby “Birdman” Pigeon lay facedown in a wall-to-wall puddle of his own blood. Even from fifteen feet away, Bryan could see the bloody wound that split his body from the right side of his neck down just past his sternum.

If Zou hadn’t taken him and Pookie off the case, would Birdman still be alive? Or might that have been Pookie lying there instead?

Bryan looked left, into the living room. There, Jimmy Hung and Stephen Koening were looking over a woman who’d been dead at least twenty-four hours. She was the source of the corpse smell.

“Rex did that,” Pookie said. “I guess I was wrong when I thought he wasn’t a threat.”

Bryan nodded. “I guess so.”

He sniffed again. That smell of death, sure, but there was something else in this house …

“Come on,” Pookie said, “let’s check out Rex’s room.”

They walked down the hall, being careful about where they stepped. This many people in the house was a problem. Feet and hands threatened to destroy evidence, to accidentally trample on some key bit of information that could lead to the perp. But at the same time, everyone knew the hard facts — murders are usually solved with speed and logic, not with weeks of evidence analysis. If a killer isn’t caught in the first forty-eight hours, odds are he won’t be caught at all. They needed as much information as they could get as fast as they could get it.

Bryan saw blood on the hallway wall, spattering the white paint and some of the picture frames. The picture frame with the most blood had cracks radiating away from a hole just left of center.

That new smell grew stronger.

To get to Rex’s room, he had to step over Birdman’s body. Bryan reached out with a big step to avoid walking in the puddle of blood. Once on the other side, he started to turn into the open bedroom but stopped in the doorway. The door — handle ripped off, wood white and splintered where the latch used to be — had a drawing thumbtacked to it.

The blue-lined notebook paper had been torn out of a spiral binder. A line of frayed holes ran down the left- hand side. On that paper, a symbol:

It was the same drawing Bryan had sketched after waking up from his hunting dreams. The same drawing found painted in the blood of Oscar Woody, and of Jay Parlar.

Scrawled beneath the drawing were the words I dream of a better day.

“Pooks,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

Pookie was at his side, talking quietly. “I see it. Keep cool, man. Look at the rest of the room.”

Rumpled red blankets lay twirled up on a twin mattress. A small, beat-up wooden desk sat next to the bed. Sammy Berzon was under the desk, using a pen to poke through a small garbage can. A little TV sat in the far corner, a video-game console on the floor in front of it along with one controller. The room’s lone window looked out on a narrow alley filled with square plastic garbage cans. A dirty brick wall on the alley’s far side was barely more than an arm’s reach away. A three-drawer vertical dresser and a tiny closet were the room’s only other features. Bryan saw two books on the dresser, the tell-tale strip of white on the bottom of the spine showing they came from a library: On a Pale Horse and The Book of Three.

And then, Bryan noticed the walls.

Walls covered with drawings.

Drawings of guns, of people shooting each other, stabbing each other. Drawings of chain saws, axes, knives and medieval weapons, of torture devices and burning bodies. Most drawings showed a teenage boy with big brown eyes and kinky, dry brown hair. Every drawing showed this boy with rippling muscles and confident movements, using every weapon imaginable to kill Alex Panos, Jay Parlar, Oscar Woody or Issac Moses. Bryan saw Pookie staring at a drawing of an older man, his legs being broken by the snarling teenage boy.

“Holy shit,” Pookie said. “That’s a dead-ringer for Father Paul Maloney.”

Bryan took them all in, the drawings of pain, the drawings of death.

His eyes fell on one, and he could not look away. It was a man with a snake-face, the same thing Bryan had seen in his dreams. The drawing stared back at him from the wall, as if it wanted to come alive and talk. Narrow yellow eyes seemed to laugh at him.

Beneath the face was one word, written in a superhero-style typeface: Sly.

“Bryan, you okay?”

Pookie’s voice sounded distant. Bryan’s breath finally slid out in a long huff. He breathed in through his nose — that new scent flooded him. So much stronger in here, in the room where Rex had slept and played and drawn. The smell made Bryan relaxed and excited all at the same time; it made him want to do something, but he didn’t know what that something was.

A hand patting his back. “Bri-Bri, you okay?” Pookie leaned in and whispered: “Is it the drawings?”

Bryan nodded toward the snake-face. “You asked if a sketch artist could draw what I saw in my dream? Well, there you go.”

Pookie looked at the drawing of Sly.

“That’s messed up,” Pookie said. “There’s a lot of messed up going on around here today.”

Sammy Berzon finally stood up. He dropped a crumbled piece of tissue into a clear evidence bag. “You guys see Birdman’s wound?”

Bryan and Pookie nodded.