What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun)

sold by Annalena.

The nightstand drawer contained a dozen bottles of various herbs in capsule form. There were sticks of incense, a porcelain holder in which to fix them, and a box of wooden matches.

John saw the corner of something dark protruding from between Sandra’s two bed pillows. A red sachet plump with a perfumed cloth.

He assumed the sachet would smell sweet, but the scent proved to be faint and vaguely unpleasant. He could not identify the fragrance, and the more often that he held it to his nose to inhale, the more his stomach turned with incipient nausea.

Bookshelves surrounded a fireplace above which a flat-screen TV was mounted. Instead of books, the shelves held crystal cats of different kinds, crystal spheres and obelisks.

The Lucases owned two real cats that had fled the murder house on the night: British spotted shorthairs named Posh and Fluff.

On an end table stood a geode, its hard black crust filled with red crystal spears. In the shop, it would have dazzled, but here it looked like a snarling maw bristling with hundreds of bloody teeth.

What had sparkled in the Fourth Avenue store instead darkled in this house. What had been cheerful there had here become cheerless.

Across the width of the mantel were clear-glass cups holding fat candles, most of them green, a few blue, and one black.

Elsewhere on the ground floor, he found Piper’s Gallery items in the kitchen. A pantry shelf crammed full of double-stacked jars of exotic dried herbs. A crystal sphere on a redwood stand at the center of the dinette table, three half-melted candles encircling it.

In the study, where Robert Lucas was murdered with a hammer, there were no candles or crystal pieces, nothing from the gallery.

Upstairs, the grandmother’s room was also free of Annalena’s merchandise.

John dreaded returning to Celine’s room, where to his mind’s ear the bed was as saturated with screams as with blood. But he needed to know if she possessed items from Piper’s Gallery. He would have overlooked them on his previous visit, unaware that they might be significant.

He found nothing, and he was further convinced that the calla lilies had been left there by Billy after he rang them over his sister’s corpse. Celine was his fourth and final victim.

In Billy’s room, among the shelves of paperbacks nestled a pair of crystal lizards—one green, one clear—and a blue obelisk. On his nightstand a volcanic-rock geode featured deposited purple crystals of amethyst. A pair of three-inch-diameter scented blue candles in glass holders stood on his desk.

None of those things had seemed significant before. Now they intrigued John.

Apparently only the disabled mother, Sandra, and her son—who supposedly adored her—had bought in to Annalena’s theory of natural therapies that would help them to “prosper in all ways.”

This mattered, but John could see no reason that it should. He sensed that these objects had not brought the Lucases into greater harmony with nature but, to the contrary, had in some mysterious way endangered them. If he could discover why that was true, he would better understand the threat to Nicky and the kids, and he would have more hope of protecting them. His intuition told him as much, and intuition never failed him.

Throughout this second search of the house, he half expected to hear the silvery ringing of the calla-lily bells. The sound did not arise, perhaps because the entity that came with him from the state hospital the previous day was no longer his fellow traveler, but waited for him at home.

As John pored through the boy’s desk drawers again, a voice that was not otherworldly said, “Breaking and entering, Calvino?”

27

KEN SHARP WAS ONE OF THE DETECTIVES WHO HAD CAUGHT the Lucas call. The case belonged to him and his partner, Sam Tanner, and of everyone in Robbery-Homicide, they were the most jealous of their turf.

When Sharp entered Billy’s room, he seemed less puzzled than offended. Head shaved to hide creeping baldness, eyes set deep, nose hawkish, having a tendency to flush with impatience as readily as with rage, he possessed a face better suited to intimidating scowls than to smiles of friendship.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

“A neighbor had a key.”

“That’s how you got in. I’m wondering why?”

Twenty years earlier, the police and the courts protected John from reporters who were in those days marginally more responsible and less invasive than the aggressively sensational crew currently running the media circus. His role in Blackwood’s death was more suggested than described, and his status as a juvenile ensured his privacy. In the wake of his loss, he was allowed to fade into his grief and guilt, and the orphanage became a wall between his future and that night of horror. Even when he went to the police academy, the background report on him reached no further into the past than to his departure from St. Christopher’s Home and School at the age of seventeen years six months, where his record had been exemplary both in terms of academic achievement and discipline.

If they knew his full story, some would suggest that his ordeal might make him psychologically unfit to be a homicide detective. Was not his choice of this career an indication of an obsessive focus on his loss? Did it not suggest in his pursuit of every murderer that he might be seeking symbolic revenge for the slaughter of his family? And in that case, could he be trusted to treat every suspect with a presumption of innocence, or was he likely to abuse his power as an officer of the law?

The moment he revealed the events of that long-ago night, his life and the lives of his wife and children would change. His ability to function as a detective would be diminished, might even be more profoundly affected than he believed, in ways he could not predict. And of all the people in Robbery-Homicide, Ken Sharp was the least likely to treat John’s revelations with discretion.

Sitting on the edge of the desk, his mood far less casual than his posture suggested, Sharp said, “And just minutes ago I heard you’ve been up to the state hospital twice to see the butcher boy. You told them you were assigned to the case.”

That was a harder blow to John’s credibility than being caught searching Billy’s desk.

“No. I didn’t tell them I was the go-to guy. I will admit … I let them make that assumption.”

“You did, huh? Why the hell did you, John?”

Sooner rather than later, he would have to tell someone about the eerie similarities between the murders of the Valdane family two decades earlier and the recent massacre of the Lucases. He was morally bound to warn that the crimes of Alton Turner Blackwood were perhaps being imitated half a continent away from the place where they were once committed. He didn’t know how he could deliver that warning without mentioning his suspicion that this case had a supernatural dimension, an assertion that might require him to be suspended and to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

Sharp’s face looked boiled. “An orderly up there says maybe you think Billy’s innocent, you think he’s some kind of victim himself.”

“No. That’s wrong. I know he did it. But it’s not that simple.”

“Hey, pal, it’s as goddamn simple as anything gets. He’s naked on the front porch, drenched in blood. He says he did them all. His prints are on every weapon. The lab says his semen was in the sister. What you’ve got here is you’ve got the definition of an open-and-shut case.”

This was neither the time at which nor the audience to which John would have chosen to make his revelations, but he could not avoid telling at least some of his story to Sharp.

Rolling shut the desk drawer he had been searching, switching on Billy’s computer, he said, “I have reason to believe the killer—the boy—intended to murder more families than his own.”

“That would be a noisemaker if it’s true. What reason?”

“First, I want you to understand why I poached your case. My own family is one of the others he intended to kill.”

John did not look up from the computer to see Sharp’s reaction, but he heard both surprise and skepticism in