intent, then no leaves or pages or blades but only snow, girls falling through night snow and slamming into a snow-mantled street—
“John?”
Someone shook him by the shoulder, and when he opened his eyes, he thought he must still be dreaming, because Lionel Timmins leaned over him.
“John, we have to talk.”
The dusting of snow on Lionel’s face was, on second look, white beard stubble. He hadn’t shaved recently.
Sitting up straighter in his chair, swinging his legs off the footstool, John said, “What’re you doing here? What’s going on, what’s happening?”
Perching on the stool, Lionel said, “That’s what I need to know, partner. What the hell is going on?”
John wiped his face with both hands, as if sleep were a cocoon from which he emerged and he were pulling off the gossamer remnants that still clung to him. “When did your beard go white?”
“Years ago. That’s why I try to shave twice a day. Makes me look like Uncle damn Remus or something. Listen, what is this—you gave Mrs. Fontere your card with all your phone numbers?”
“Mrs. who?”
“Fontere. Lois Fontere. Jack Woburn’s sister.”
“Oh, yeah, all right. Aunt Lois.”
Filaments of sleep, like threads with a static charge, clung to John, tangling his thoughts. He needed to be wide awake with Lionel.
“I’m on this all night,” Lionel said, “now I just find out from her you were at the hospital.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s a mess, but she’s alive. John, you were at the hospital just
“Was he the one? Tane? The one who jumped with the girl?”
“He did all of them. Including Mickey Scriver, his partner.”
“I saw them fall. Walking to my car in the portico, heard the shots, the glass breaking.”
Lionel’s flat expressionless stare was one that he sometimes used with witnesses and often with suspects, to make them wonder how much he knew. “You saw them fall.”
“She was a fine girl. A good girl.”
“You saw them fall and you—what?—just drove away?”
As John rose from the chair, Lionel got up from the footstool.
“You want some coffee?” John asked.
“No.”
“Something else?”
“No.”
John went to the gallery wall on which were hung the birthday photos of the kids. Lionel followed him, but John focused on the photographs.
“You’re on leave, John. Are you still on leave?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you dogging this case? Why did you want to talk to Brenda Woburn?”
“I wasn’t there as a cop. It was a personal matter.”
“After midnight. In the ICU. The woman’s recovering from a gunshot, surgery—and you stop by for a chat? A woman I don’t think you met before that moment?”
John didn’t reply. He studied a picture of Naomi on her seventh birthday. She wore a tam-o’-shanter. One of her enduring enthusiasms was hats. He cherished Naomi for many reasons, but certainly on his top ten list was the intensity of her love for the world and the passionate delight that she could take in the most mundane things, almost a
“John, there’s major heat on this. One of our own kills his partner, four other people, then himself. The press is foaming at the mouth. This isn’t my case alone. There’s a little task force. Sharp and Tanner—they’re part of it.”
John turned from the photographs. “Do they know I was at the hospital?”
“Not yet. But I might have to tell them. John, why are you on a thirty-day leave?”
“A family thing. Like I told you.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d lie to me.”
John met his stare. “It’s not a lie. It’s just incomplete.”
“Ken Sharp implied you tried to horn in on the Lucas case.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“Just that if you come back from leave, he won’t work with you on the Tane investigation. He wanted me clear on that.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“All he said was he doesn’t want a repeat of the Lucas house, doesn’t want to go into Tane’s place and find you cooking dinner.”
The “cooking dinner” reference was a euphemism, a suggestion that John had been cooking the crime scene, planting evidence. Ken might have reached that conclusion after talking to the orderly, Coleman Hanes, at the state hospital, who suspected that, in spite of the boy’s confession, John believed Billy Lucas must be innocent.
Lionel said, “Were you really in the Lucas house unofficially?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell? Why?”
John glanced at the hall beyond the open study door. He didn’t want to be overheard. “Let’s go outside.”
The air was cool, but the day chilled only in the shadows. They sat in the sun, on wrought-iron chairs, at a table on the terrace.
As succinctly as he had laid out his case for Nelson Burchard, John told Lionel about the Blackwood murders twenty years earlier, about the loss of his family.
Lionel did not respond with the cloying earnestness of Burchard. He knew that pity could be an insult. He said only “Shit,” and in that one vulgarity, he expressed genuine sympathy and a touching depth of friendship.
As John listed the uncanny similarities between the recent Lucas murders and the Valdane-family massacre two decades earlier, Lionel listened with interest. But when the discussion turned to the fact that three of the Sollenburgs had been shot, that twenty years later three of the Woburns were shot as well, and when John noted that in each instance the daughter was murdered last, Lionel blinked in confusion until he blinked himself into a frown.
“You think there’s some link between these cases?”
“They were thirty-three days apart, like back then. I warned Burchard—thirty-three days.”
“Thirty-three days could be coincidence.”
“It isn’t.”
The sky was pale, the sun a white instead of a yolk, as if a high, finely diffused pollution muted the natural colors.
Leaning forward, arms on the table, Lionel said, “What’re you trying to tell me? I don’t get it. Help me make the leap.”
Although he risked sounding like a man seeking a psychiatric-disability pension, John was desperate for an ally. “Thirty-three more days will put us at November seventh. Blackwood’s third family was the Paxtons. Mother, father, two sons, two daughters.”
“You mean this is somehow copycat stuff? Alton Blackwood’s crimes redone?”
A faint breeze quivered the scarlet leaves on the half-sered autumn grass, but neither the cascading boughs of the deodar cedar nor the rose brambles on the arbor stirred whatsoever.
