the man’s voice.
“Your family? How’s he know your family? He never said anything about whacking a cop’s family.”
“There’s a document on this computer,” John said, “photos of my wife and kids. It’s the start of a murder scrapbook.”
On the computer were two documents of interest—CALVINO1 and CALVINO2—the first of which would crack the lock on John’s past whether he wanted that door flung open or not. He could see no way to show Ken Sharp the second document but not the first.
“Why’d you come here in the first place?” Sharp asked. “How’d you know this thing was on his computer, you should look for it?”
John scrolled down the alphabetized directory—and found no documents with his name as their titles. He scrolled to the top and down again: A, B, C, into the Ds.
“It’s not here. It was right here last night, my name in the title, and now it’s not.”
“A murder scrapbook of your family, and now it’s gone? Where’s it gone?”
In his own voice, John heard how sincerity could sound like slippery evasion. “It’s been deleted. Someone must’ve scrubbed the directory.”
“Who? I mean, Billy sure as hell didn’t come back and scrub it.”
“I don’t know who.” John couldn’t say there had been a ghost in the machine, literally a ghost. “But someone did it.”
Sharp got up from the edge of the desk. His expression was dark, but his face brightened to the high pink of fresh-cut ham.
“Give me the keys you got from the neighbor.”
Instead of fulfilling that request, John exited the directory, switched off the computer, and said, “You’ve got a full backup of the hard drive in the evidence locker. Load it up, look for two documents—Calvino 1 and Calvino 2.”
“John, for God’s sake, what you’ve done is possible criminal trespass, I shouldn’t even be here myself with the investigation closed now. Seems like you’ve got a screw loose about this case, I don’t know why, but it’s my case, mine and Sam’s, and I want those keys.”
As he produced the key ring with the dangling-cat charm and surrendered it to Sharp, John said, “Load the backup. Look for those documents. Do it, all right? Other families are in jeopardy, Ken. Not only mine.”
“For one thing,” Sharp said, pocketing the key, “no one’s ever escaped from the high-security floor of the state hospital.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“For another thing, Billy Lucas is dead.”
The news struck John harder than he might have expected. He recalled the broken boy as he had been only that morning: arms restrained by netting, in a trancelike thrall of grief and despair.
“Dead—when?” he asked.
“Less than an hour ago. I got a call from Coleman Hanes. That’s when I learned about—you.”
“How did he manage to do it?”
“He didn’t. Not suicide. There’ll be an autopsy. Right now it looks like maybe it was a cerebral hemorrhage.”
The past was a weight John Calvino had always carried. Now it was worse than a weight, it was a noose, and he felt the roughness of it around his neck.
“What’s going on with you, John? We don’t run the ball the same way, but we’re on the same team, and you’ve always seemed like you have enough of the right stuff.”
“I’m sorry, Ken. I shouldn’t have tramped your heels like this. I’m in a strange place. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Right now I’ve got some thinking to do.”
He went down through the murder house, and Sharp followed.
On the staircase landing, John paused only briefly to look at Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. The two little girls in white dresses looked happy in the garden with the Chinese lanterns, happy and safe and unaware that Evil walked the world.
From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
The boy and the world would never be in harmony, but the boy and the night became as one. The boy flowed through the woods and meadows of the night, and the night flowed through the boy.
After that first exhilarating excursion, which ended minutes before dawn, he carried a small flashlight with him for those places where moonlight couldn’t reach and for those nights when the sky was moonless or brightened by only the thinnest crescent. He never used the flashlight within sight of the house.
Over the next few years, the boy’s night vision improved to an uncanny degree. The more time he spent out in the world between dusk and dawn, the better he could see even when the sky was overcast and the stars were only legend. He used the flashlight less and less, and his trust of the night was rewarded when the night increasingly, generously opened itself to him.
Once, kneeling at the edge of the deep pond, listening to fish take insects off the surface and wondering whether he might be quick enough with his hand to snatch one of those closest to the bank, he glimpsed his vague reflection in the inky water. But his eyes were not dark as human eyes should have been in such conditions. In them shimmered the faintest gold of animal eye-shine; his eyes drank in the weak glow from a quarter moon and the far twinkle of stars, and magnified them to assist his vision.
However far the boy went or how late he roamed, the raven stayed with him. He was sure it did. Sometimes he saw it backlit by the moon or detected its silhouette gliding across a star-speckled vault. From time to time, he glimpsed its moonshadow undulating across the land.
And if for periods of time he didn’t see the bird, he always heard it. The flap of pinions. The whoosh of rigid wings in a gliding dive. The disturbance of leaves as it preceded him tree limb to tree limb through the dismal forest. Its low resonant prruck, its baritone brronk, its occasional bell-clear cry.
The raven was his companion, his tutelary, his familiar. The raven taught him about the night, and the boy began to learn what the night knows.
The land welcomed the boy as entirely as the darkness did. The fields, the woods, the stream, the pond, every vale and every hill and every thrusting mass of rock. He could walk any deer trail, make a new trail of his own, thrash through a thicket of any composition, and come to dawn without a burr or thistle in his clothes, without nettle rash or poison ivy. No insect ever bit or stung him, nor any snake. He could ascend steep inclines of loose shale as quietly as he could make his way up slopes of grass. No vine tripped, no bramble snared. He was never lost. He roamed the night land as though he might be some goat-legged, goat-eared, horned god who ruled all wild things.
In time, he began to kill two or three nights a month. Mostly rabbits. They appeared before dusk, coming out of their burrows, into meadows, to nibble on tender grass and flavorful weeds. The boy sat in the meadow to wait for them, sometimes catching the musky smell of them before they arrived. His own scent was by this time familiar to everything that ran or hopped, or crawled, or slithered. He could sit on a rock or log with such perfect stillness and for so long that they feared him no more than they feared the thing on which he sat. When they wandered close, he seized them, either to strangle them or snap their necks, or stab them with his knife.
He dispatched them neither to feed upon them nor to take their pelts for trophies. At first he killed to assert his authority over the land and every living thing that it produced. Later, he killed the animals from time to time because he didn’t yet dare kill people, though he knew the day would come when all warm-blooded creatures would be game to him.
Larger and stronger and quicker than he had once been, the boy also had the power to lure and mesmerize. Deer came to him on narrow trails, at pinch points between steep rocks and phalanxes of trees, their
