The Killing Circle

26

In the morning, I wake to find William sitting at the end of my bed.

His body shaped in the hunched, head-cocked posture of a concerned friend sitting vigil. Even his face—still densely bearded as an oven brush—could be mistaken for sympathetic, his eyes looking down on me with a still intensity. Yet these are only first impressions. And they are wrong.

William’s hands rise from the sheets. Fresh soil dropping off them in clumps. The nails ripped and weeping. Hands reaching for me.

I try to sit up. A weight on my legs prevents them from moving. The only action I’m capable of is watching.

His hands are going to kill me. They are about to do the most terrible things, not him. This is what his cracked lips seem to want to say. He is an instrument of death, but also dead himself.

I make a note of this—my first fright of the day—in my journal which I have taken to keeping by my bed at night. A chronicle of actual events and dream diary all in one. I should likely have kept separate notebooks for each, but so many passways have opened between my waking and sleeping worlds it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

Take the ballcap, for instance.

I’m plodding through my breakfast routine of coffee making and cereal pouring when I first see it. Even then, it takes a few seconds to understand what it means. A Yankees cap. Sitting on the coffee table in the living room.

I pick it up and bring it to my nose—Petra’s shampoo, still clinging to the cotton. The sliding glass doors are closed. But unlocked. And the curtains I was sure to have pulled closed the night before stand open.

I can see you.

Once I’ve closed the curtains and locked the doors, then gone round the basement and main floor to check the other doors and windows, I return to Petra’s cap, studying it as though a clue has been stitched into its fabric.

Petra wore it, now she’s thought to be dead. It was left with Angela, now she’s disappeared. And now it’s with me.

It could be you.

Ramsay already thinks (and with some good reason) that I’m involved in Petra’s death and perhaps the others from before. If he found out her ballcap was in my possession, it would be more than enough to arrest me. The first piece of hard evidence connecting me to one of the murders. The Sandman wants me to hold it in my hands and know how it feels. To know what can be done to me without ever touching me.

It’s a sin, the church says, to do the things that I do

But how can I stop until I’ve done them to you?

The Yankees cap is a promise of things to come, a show of power, a signature. But it’s also a game.

Tag. I’m it.

The next thing I know I’m being asked to leave the offices of the National Star. The lobby, to be precise. It’s as far as I get before I’m stopped trying to tiptoe by reception without a pass. When asked my intended business—Patrick Rush, here for a surprise visit to my old friend Tim Earheart—the guy behind the security desk punches my name into his terminal and a flag pops up. Quite a few flags, judging by his reddened cheeks and phone at his ear, a digit shy of completing his 911 call.

“Just tell Earheart I’m downstairs,” I tell the security guy, whose tortured face shows that while I’m in no position to be making deals, he might get into some serious trouble if he has to use his flashlight on me.

“Do as he says,” a female voice says behind me. I turn to find the Managing Editor smiling one of her death smiles. Except now she’s no longer the Managing Editor but the youngest Editor-in-Chief in the paper’s history. “Let him say hello and be on his way.”

She keeps smiling. If it were real, I’d be halfway to falling in love. But there’s absolutely no mistaking the Editor-in-Chief’s expression as warmth. As it is I’m backing away with every step she takes closer.

“Always nice to see an ex-employee going out the door,” she says.

I’m spinning out into the heat as I glimpse Tim Earheart rushing past the Editor-in-Chief. It won’t happen again on his lips.

“You can’t get fired twice, you know. Or are you trying to get me fired?” Tim says as he takes me by the arm and hauls me away from the building. Through the glass doors I can see the Editor-in- Chief still there, her hands on her slim, treadmilled hips.

I follow Tim across Front Street to stand on the narrow edge of grass between the pavement and the fence that keeps pedestrians from the tracks leading in and out of Union station below.

“I’m working,” Tim says. “We’re not all novelists you know.”

“I’ll make this short.”

“The shorter the better.”

“Can you get access to government agency databases?”

“Depends which one.”

“Children’s Aid. Foster care. Whoever does permanent guardianships.”

He puts a cigarette in his mouth but makes no move to light it. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Someone you know?”

“I know her. Not well, but I know her.”

“A kid?”

“She’s grown up now.”

“So why not give her a call?”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Tim Earheart reads me closely for the first time, and I sense that what I say next will decide how the rest of this exchange is going to go. I want Tim involved, but not involved.

“Are you going to light that thing?”

He pulls the unlit cigarette out of his lips and flicks it over the fence. “What’s her name?”

“Angela Whitmore. But that might only be her adoptive parents’ surname. Or probably not. I mean, that’s the name I know her by, but it may not be real.”

“Tracking down an adoption without the kid’s name—it’s not going to happen.”

“I don’t think it was a voluntary adoption.”

“How’s that?”

“She was taken from her natural parents. State intervention. I don’t know the specifics. One of those situations where they had to.”

“That’s something.”

I tell him whatever other details I have that might be of help, which aren’t all that many. Angela’s approximate age (late twenties to early thirties), job experience (legal secretary), possible educational background (liberal arts most likely). I end up leaving out more than I give him: her fictional journal and my thieving of its essential contents, our night together and the discovery of missing toes. Maybe later, I tell myself. Maybe, if this all turns out well, I’ll fill him in on the whole thing.

“One question,” Tim says as I shake his hand in thanks and check both ways along Front Street for a taxi.

“You want to know why I need to find this out.”

“No. I want to know what’s in it for me.”