It was snowing that day.
Death and ice and space reaching for her.
Now she was in the shower, a spray of hot water cascading over her head.
Now she was spinning toward the edge of the world, a twirl of snow falling all around her.
In the bathroom.
The front seat.
Standing. Falling. Waking. Dreaming.
Back in the shower, a blanket of steam enfolding her.
Back at the cliff, feeling the impact as they punched through the guardrail. And then she was dropping, plunging into the bottomless day, the snow swallowing everything in the world.
Falling.
And then.
An abrupt smack. Slamming into that tree halfway down the gorge. A strange moment when time stopped to catch its breath, to feel out what it would be like to inch forward again.
Groans next to her. The Illusionist smiling a dark smile, yanking the scissors out of his leg. And then.
Then.
Patrick’s voice floating down to her. That’s when the killer cut her, sliced her arm. And she was bleeding. Bleeding. Fading, watching the melting snow slide down the cracked windshield. The day was crying for her. And she was wrapped in a nightmare, slipping away. Falling again, but in a different way. Falling toward forever.
But Patrick came for her.
He came for her and he saved her. Like a father would, like a hero would, he risked his life to rescue her. Rappelling down, reaching out, catching her just in time.
She’d never thought of him in those terms before that day. As a father. As a hero. But it was true. He cared about her and she cared about him and they were a family. Kind of weird. Kind of screwed up, but still a family.
But it was confusing.
Sometimes she felt like a little girl who wanted to hold his hand, to call him Daddy; sometimes she felt like a young woman getting ready to move out and live on her own.
Caught between two worlds. Drifting. Falling.
Tessa turned off the water and stood still in the warm steam, letting the water drip off her body, her memories, her scars. After a moment she stepped out of the shower stall and wrapped a thick towel around herself.
And then there was that whole bizarre thing last night. That crazy homeless guy had actually killed himself right there, just like that, and if she hadn’t covered her eyes, she would have seen him die.
Falling headlong.
Falling and dying.
Tessa caught sight of her outline in the mirror, a faint reflection, distant and blurred, surrounded by steam and dreams. For a moment it hardly looked real. Just the vague shape of a girl with dripping black hair, faceless, emotionless, obscure around the edges. In a fog.
Her reflection reminded her of looking at a phantom.
An Eidolon, she thought, remembering the phrase from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dream-Land”: Where an Eidolon, named Night, On a black throne sits upright…
Poe really seemed to understand the landscape of pain, and she’d walked through it with him since her mom died, reading his poems and stories over and over, letting their stark images soak into her-the raven and the pit and the cask and the thumping heart. Usually after reading something once or twice, she could remember it pretty well, but she remembered some stanzas of “Dream-Land,” word for word.
There the traveller meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past-
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by-
White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth-and Heaven.
Her reflection.
A ghost in the slim shape of her mother.
Sheeted memories of the past.
A phantom lurking in the land of dreams.
Tessa spread her fingers against the mirror. It felt warm against her fingertips, but cool too. She slid her hand across the glass, and her eyes and forehead became visible. But just that much. The rest of her still remained a ghost, wrapped in white, lost somewhere in the misty curls of thick, warm steam.
Caught between two worlds. Drifting. Falling.
A raven unable to fly.
And then Tessa snapped the rubber band against her wrist and did it again and again until the skin was red and raw.
But it didn’t help her feel better at all.
And the drops of water began to trickle down the mirror, as if her reflection were weeping to see her standing so sad and alone on the other side of the glass.
25
As I sat in the hotel lobby and waited for Tessa, I thought about the man’s death the night before. I’d told Detective Dunn I was going to untangle the circumstances surrounding John Doe’s death.
I intended to keep my promise.
Using my cell phone’s Internet browser, I logged onto the city’s digital video archives and reviewed the videos of the trolley’s departure, but found no images of men with black duffel bags boarding the trolley. So, the two men who climbed into the Ford Mustang were already at the scene when John Doe committed suicide.
I put a call in to the Bureau to run the plates on the Mustang. I also left a text message for the San Diego County medical examiner’s office to see if he’d been able to identify our John Doe from last night, and then I set up a meeting with Lieutenant Graysmith, the head of the SDPD homicide division. I wanted to find out more about Detective Dunn and his interest in John Doe’s death.
I looked around the hotel lobby again.
Still no Tessa.
I grabbed an apple from the bowl at the hotel’s registration counter.
She likes to sleep late, but since we only had a couple of days here in San Diego, she’d agreed to get up by nine, and that was over an hour ago.
After I finished the apple, I checked the time and realized I’d been awake for over five hours. No wonder I was so hungry. I pushed myself out of the leather lounge chair and was halfway to the elevator when I heard heavy footsteps behind me and a harsh, growling voice that I recognized right away. “Morning, Pat.”
“Ralph?” I turned. Special Agent Ralph Hawkins came lumbering toward me. I greeted him with a slap on the shoulder, and it felt like I was hitting a bag of concrete. Ralph had started lifting weights again, and I could tell. “What are you doing here? I didn’t expect to see you until next week. I thought you’d still be testifying at Basque’s retrial in Chicago.”
“It’s a mess up there.” Ralph’s voice sounds just like what you’d expect from a man who can twist a frying pan around a burrito with his bare hands. “A real circus.” Ralph worked his shoulders back and forth, probably trying to make them comfortable in the shirt that he’d obviously bought before he started pumping iron again last year. He’s not quite in the shape he was as an Army Ranger twenty years ago, before he joined the FBI, but he’s close. “Defense found out one of the state’s DNA experts, guy named Hoyt, lied on his resume. Never attended Ohio State at all. Messed up our case even worse. Pushed things back at least a month.”
I felt an echo of the chill I’d known in the slaughterhouse. Even without this kind of delay, trials as
