window, but it had been painted shut. He pushed against the frame but there was no way it was going to give without making a god-awful racket. The last thing he wanted to do was let everyone in the house know exactly where he was.
He crept back to the bedroom door, doing his best to keep his weight distribution even so that the floorboards didn’t betray him. He could hear them moving about downstairs, working their way through the rooms. They sounded nervous, pumped up, ready for a fight. They were talking loudly, barking instructions at each other. He stood absolutely still. No way this was going to end well. They’d be listening for the slightest out of place sound. The way he figured, he had at best a minute before they came upstairs. The place wasn’t that big, and there weren’t that many places to hide. It would take no time to sweep through the downstairs, and given the all- pervasive reek, they all knew they were in a death house. They were expecting to find a corpse. They weren’t expecting him to be there. If he startled them, it could all go south very quickly. “Lethe,” he breathed, “please tell me they didn’t send a Tactical Response Unit.”
“No guns,” the voice in his ear assured him.
That was one less thing to worry about. He heard them clumping about beneath him-which meant he had less than half a minute to get out of the house. He couldn’t just run down the stairs and out the front door, no matter how much the simplicity of the idea appealed. They would be on to him before he was halfway down the stairs. He didn’t really want to have to explain what he was doing in the house. But, for that matter, he didn’t really want to shoot anyone either. So it was all about not being caught.
“Three cars in the street out front,” Lethe whispered in his ear. Frost almost laughed at the younger man’s theatrics. It wasn’t as though it was Lethe who was standing over a corpse, separated from half a dozen policemen by a few inches of wood and plasterboard. “Two men are still outside. One is heading around the side of the house, going for the backdoor. That means three are inside.”
Three wasn’t a good number.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Frost whispered, rubbing at his forehead. “Can you do something? Cause a distraction?”
Without waiting for an answer, Frost crept across the landing. He ignored the baby’s room; the window there looked out onto the front of the house. That left the bathroom which, as he had expected, had a tiny fly-window that was neither for use nor ornament. Frost started to reach around for his gun, ready to shoot his way out if he had to, when he saw the chair half across the bathroom doorway. Again he was struck by how out of place it was. He looked up. There was a small loft access hatch in the ceiling directly above it. The hatch was barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. He didn’t have a lot of choice. It was that or charge down the stairs guns blazing straight onto the evening news.
Frost heard the downstairs backdoor opening.
The cops had done the first sweep.
They were talking now. He could hear every muffled word they said.
“You check upstairs,” one of them said. Frost heard the crackle of a radio. They were sending in a situation report: downstairs all-clear.
Frost didn’t wait for the sound of the first footsteps on the stairs. He stood on the chair and reached up. Placing the flats of his palms on the wood he pushed slightly, lifting it less than an inch clear and eased it aside. Moving quickly, he gripped the sides of the loft hatch and pulled himself up, swinging his legs inide the hole as he heard the heavy sound of the policeman climbing the stairs. He didn’t have time to slide the hatch all the way back in place. All he could do was ease it across so that it covered most of the hole and hope no one looked up. Frost lay on his back in the dark, listening to the sound of the search beneath him. The chair was still directly under the hatch, but there was nothing he could do about it so it wasn’t worth worrying about. He lay on his back, his Browning cradled against his chest.
“Oh, sweet Lord,” he heard, followed by the hacking sound of a man heaving his guts up. More footsteps on the stairs, running this time. Frost risked rolling onto his side, and put his eye to the crack. He couldn’t see much through the narrow gap, the shoulder of one uniformed officer and part of the back of another. “Trust me, you really don’t want to go in there.”
“Damn,” another muttered, backing out of the room.
Frost didn’t dare breathe. All it would take was for one of them to realize the chair was out of place and to look up. And because he didn’t dare breathe, the smell clawed its way into his lungs, trying to force him to. He closed his eyes, willing them to go back downstairs. He couldn’t exactly hide in the loft space forever, and soon the place would be swarming with forensics and crime scene investigators. One of them would look up. They would see that the hatch was out of place, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He tried to think. His prints were all over the house, but he hadn’t touched the woman or the bed. But he had touched the window, her phone, the door handle. Had he touched the balustrade? Had he touched anything downstairs? He cursed himself for being an idiot.
“What kind of animal would do something like that to a woman?”
That was a damned good question.
Frost had spent enough time around killers to know that this kind of murder needed hatred to fuel it. It wasn’t just about killing. Using a knife made it intimate. Slashing once or twice was hard, being forced to look into the eyes of your victim while they fought you, but slashing forty or fifty times? Opening up the woman like she was some kind of medical exhibit? That was more like an autopsy than a killing. That took rage.
“Vince,” one of the voices beneath him said. “I think you better take a look at this.”
They moved out of his line of sight. They were in the nursery.
The darkness above him was filled with the sound of his breathing. It was so loud in his ears he couldn’t believe they couldn’t hear it down there.
“Now would be a really good time to give me that bloody distraction,” Frost rasped. The words came out like a prayer.
Lethe was listening.
15
The boy looked up at his father, adoration in his eyes.
Jair had never been able to look up at his own father that way. What did it feel like to look up into the face that you would grow into? It was a simple right every boy deserved. But then, Jair had never known his father. He had been murdered before Jair was born. This garden was the only place he felt close to him. Jair came here at night sometimes and imagined the sigh of the wind through the olive branches was his father’s voice. His mother had begged him time and again not to come, not to dwell in the past. It was a place for ghosts, she said. He didn’t know whether she meant the past or this garden, or both. It didn’t matter. She was a ghost herself now. When he picked up one of the scattered stones he couldn’t help but wonder if it had been the one that had killed his father. He felt out the sharp edges with his thumb. More than once he had clutched a stone and driven it against his temple, trying to feel the same pain Judas must have felt, but he couldn’t. All the stones in the world couldn’t capture his father’s pain because it wasn’t physical. He knew that better than anyone.
Father and son walked hand in hand through the olive arch into Gethsemane.
The garden was in bloom. All around them color rioted, the clashes ranging from the subtle to the raw. He took a deep breath and led Menahem across the garden toward a small, white stone shrine. The grass was mottled with golden spots of light where the sun filtered down through the canopy of leaves. Every fragrance imaginable surrounded them. Despite the heat, the man shivered. The shrine had seen better days. The face of the saint had mildewed. A few trinkets had been laid out around the shrine in offering: a figurine made out of olive twigs and bound with reed, a nail, a fragment of slate marked with the cross, and a coin. That was his offering, a remembrance of the second man in the garden’s tragedy. Everyone remembered the betrayal but forgot the sacrifice. His son clutched his hand tighter, as though sensing his discomfort. There was a simple affection to the gesture, but it wasn’t strong enough to save a man’s soul.
