“Howie employs Alec, so protocol isn’t an issue.”
Holly mulled this over. “Can you get in touch with the Dayton Police Department, and the Montgomery County district attorney? I can’t find out all I want to know about the murders of the Howard girls and about Heath Holmes—that’s the orderly’s name—but I think you could.”
“Is this guy’s trial still pending? If it is, they probably won’t want to give out a whole lot of infor—”
“Mr. Holmes is dead.” She paused. “Just like Terry Maitland.”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “How weird can this get?”
“Weirder,” she said. Another thing of which she had no doubt.
“Weirder,” he repeated. “Maggots in the cantaloupe.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Call Mr. Gold, okay?”
“I still think I had better call Mr. Pelley first. Just to be sure.”
“If you really think so. And Ms. Gibney . . . I guess maybe you do know your business.”
That made her smile.
11
Holly got the green light from Mr. Pelley and called Howie Gold at once, now pacing a worry-track on the cheap hotel carpet and obsessively punching at her Fitbit to read her pulse. Yes, Mr. Gold thought it would be a good idea if she flew down, and no, she didn’t need to fly coach. “Book business class,” he said. “More legroom.”
“All right.” She felt giddy. “I will.”
“You really don’t believe Terry killed the Peterson boy?”
“No more than I think Heath Holmes killed those two girls,” she said. “I think it was someone else. I think it was an outsider.”
VISITS
July 25th
1
Detective Jack Hoskins of the Flint City PD woke up at two AM on that Wednesday morning in triple misery: he had a hangover, he had a sunburn, and he needed to take a shit. It’s what I get for eating at Los Tres Molinos, he thought . . . but had he eaten there? He was pretty sure he had—enchiladas stuffed with pork and that spicy cheese—but wasn’t positive. It might have been Hacienda. Last night was hazy.
Have to cut back on the vodka. Vacation is over.
Yes, and over early. Because their shitty little department currently had just one working detective. Sometimes life was a bitch. Often, even.
He got out of bed, wincing at the single hard thud in his head when his feet hit the floor and rubbing at the burn on the back of his neck. He shucked his shorts, grabbed the newspaper off the nightstand, and plodded to the bathroom to take care of his business. Ensconced on the toilet, waiting for the semi-liquid gush that always came six hours or so after he ate Mexican food (would he never learn?), he opened the Call and rattled his way to the comics, the only part of the local paper that was worth a damn.
He was squinting at the tiny dialogue balloons in Get Fuzzy when he heard the shower curtain rattle. He looked up and saw a shadow behind the printed daisies. His heart leaped into his throat, walloping. Someone was standing in his tub. An intruder, and not just some stoned junkie thief who’d wriggled through the bathroom window and taken refuge in the only place available when he saw the bedroom light come on. No. This was the same someone who had been standing behind him at that fucking abandoned barn out in Canning Township. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. That encounter (if it had been an encounter) refused to leave his mind, and it was almost as if he had been expecting this . . . return.
You know that’s bullshit. You thought you saw a man in the barn, but when you put the light on the guy, he turned out to be nothing but a piece of busted farm equipment. Now you think there’s a man in your tub, but what looks like his head is just the shower head and what looks like his arm is nothing but your long-handled back-scrubber stuck through the grab handle on the wall. The rattling sound you heard was either a draft or just in your head.
He closed his eyes. Opened them again and stared at the shower curtain with its stupid plastic flowers, the kind of shower curtain only an ex-wife could love. Now that he was fully awake, reality reasserted itself. Just the shower head, just the grab handle with the back-scrubber stuck through it. He was an idiot. A hungover idiot, the worst kind. He—
The shower curtain rattled again. It rattled because what he had wanted to believe was his back-scrubber now grew shadowy fingers and reached out to touch the plastic. The shower head turned and seemed to stare at him through the translucent curtain. The newspaper fell from Hoskins’s relaxing fingers and landed on the tiles with a soft flap. His head was thudding and thudding. The back of his neck was burning and burning. His bowels relaxed, and the small bathroom was filled with the smell of what Jack was suddenly sure had been his last meal. The hand was reaching for the edge of the curtain. In a second—two, at the most—it would be pulled back and he would be looking at something so horrible it would make his worst nightmare seem like a sweet daydream.
“No,” he whispered. “No.” He tried to get up from the toilet, but his legs wouldn’t support him and his considerable bottom thumped back onto the ring. “Please, no. Don’t.”
A hand crept around the edge of the curtain, but instead of pulling it back, the fingers only folded around it. Tattooed on those fingers was a word: CANT.
“Jack.”
He couldn’t reply. He sat naked on the toilet with the last of his shit still dripping and plopping into the bowl, his heart a runaway engine in his chest. He felt that soon it would rip right out of him, and his last sight on earth would be of it lying on the tiles, splattering blood on his ankles and the comics section of the Flint City Call with its final twitching beats.
“That’s not a sunburn, Jack.”
He wanted to faint. To just collapse off the toilet, and if he gave himself a concussion on the tile floor, even fractured his skull, so what? At least he would be out of this. But consciousness stubbornly remained. The shadowy figure in the tub remained. The fingers on the curtain remained: CANT, in fading blue letters.
“Touch the back of your neck, Jack. If you don’t want me to pull back this curtain and show myself, do it now.”
Hoskins raised a hand and pressed it to the nape of his neck. His body’s reaction was immediate: terrifying bolts of pain which ran up to his temples and down to his shoulders. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared with blood.
“You’ve got cancer,” the figure behind the curtain informed him. “It’s in your lymph glands, and your throat, and your sinuses. It’s in your eyes, Jack. It’s eating into your eyes. Soon you’ll be able to see it, little gray knobs of malignant cancer cells swimming around in your vision. Do you know when you got it?”
Of course he knew. When this creature had touched him out there in Canning Township. When it had caressed him.
“I gave it to you, but I can take it back. Would you like me to take it back?”
“Yes,” Jack whispered. He began to cry. “Take it back. Please take it back.”
“Will you do something if I ask you?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t hesitate?”
“No!”
“I believe you. And you won’t give me any reason not to believe you, will you?”
“No! No!”
“Good. Now clean yourself up. You stink.”
The CANT hand withdrew, but the shape behind the shower curtain was still staring at him. Not a man, after all. Something far worse than the worst man who had ever lived. Hoskins reached for the toilet paper, aware as he did so that he was tilting sideways off the seat and that the world was simultaneously dimming and dwindling. And that was good. He fell, but there was no pain. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.
2