"You are," said Margaret, closing her eyes and massaging her temples. "We all are. Cases like these make me want to break down and buy a Jacuzzi."
Mom and Margaret stretched and sighed; they were tired and relieved to be finished, but I was eager to do another one.
This kind of work still fascinated me—the meticulous attention to detail, the finely honed skills, the precision required for each step. It was Dad who first taught me what to do, first pulled me in when I was just seven years old, and showed me the tools, recited their names, taught me to be reverent in the presence of the dead. It was that reverence that brought my parents together in the first place, so the story went—two morticians, desperate for living company and impressed by their mutual respect for the deceased. They treated their job like a calling. If either of them had been half as good with live people as they were with dead ones, they'd probably still be together.
I took off my apron and went out to the front office. Lauren was there, obviously bored—there was barely anything to do, and she was playing Minesweeper on the computer while she waited for five o'clock. It was 4:54.
"They let you help," said Lauren, not looking up from the monitor. The screen turned her face pale and ghostly. "I never could get into that stuff. It's much better out here."
"It's a lot less lively out here, ironically," I said.
"That's right, rub it in," said Lauren. "You think I want to spend my whole day in here doing nothing?"
"You're twenty-three years old," I told her. "You can do anything you want. You don't have to hang around here."
She clicked on the squares in her little minefield, marking spots with flags, and testing the area around them carefully.
She clicked wrong, and the screen exploded.
"You don't realize what you have here," she said at last. "Mom can be a hag sometimes, but. . . she loves us, you know? She loves you. Don't forget that."
I stared out the window. The street outside was growing dark already, and Mr. Crowley's house squatted menacingly in the snow.
"Love's not the point," I said at last. "We just do what we always do, and we get by."
Lauren turned to face me. "Love is the only point," she said. "I can barely stand to be around her, but that's just because she's just trying too hard to love us, and keep us together, and pick up the slack. It took me a long time to figure that out."
A gust of wind blew past the window, pressing on the glass and howling heavily through the gaps in the front door.
"What about Dad?" I asked.
She paused a moment. "Mom loves you enough to cover for him, I think." She paused. "So do I." It was five o'clock, and she stood up. I wondered what time it was wherever Dad was. "Listen, John—why don't you come over sometime? We can play cards or watch a movie or something, huh? Sound like fun?"
"Yeah, sure," I said. "Sometime."
"I'll see you, John." She turned off the computer, pulled on her parka, and walked out into the wind. Icy air blasted through the door, and she had to fight to close it behind her.
I went upstairs thinking about what she had said—love might be a strength, but it was also a weakness. It was the demon's weakness.
And I knew how to use it.
I grabbed my iPod from my room, still unused since I'd tossed it aside at Christmas, and got on my bike and started riding to Radio Shack. Dad's stupid present was going to come in handy after all.
When I first started stalking Mr. Crowley, I'd been looking for a weakness. Now I had three, and together they formed an opportunity. I thought about it carefully while I rode, pedaling cautiously through the afternoon's thin dusting of snow.
The first weakness was his fear of discovery, and with it his determination to wait so long between killings. He would wait and wait, putting it off until the last possible moment—
I'd seen it happen, and I'd watched "the last possible moment" grow more and more precarious. I think this went beyond fear—he avoided killing as if he hated it, as if he couldn't bear to do it until biological necessity forced his hand. The next time he killed, I was confident, he would be on the edge of death, ready to fall right in. I didn't even have to push him over the edge, just stop him from crawling back out.
That was where his second weakness came in: his body was degenerating faster than he could fix it. The night he killed Max's dad, he'd almost died, and if he hadn't had a freshly killed victim right in front of him, he probably wouldn't have survived. If I were able to distract him from his hunt, and lure him away before he had a chance to kill anybody, he wouldn't be able to regenerate at all. I imagined him desperate, unable to reach a victim in time, sweating and cursing and, in the end, melting away into a boiling puddle of inky black sludge.
I pulled up at Radio Shack, propped my bike against the wall, and went in.