Marcy swiped at her eyes. “She said he made fun of her. He called her a baby, and when she started to cry, he said it was good that she was sad. Then he told her he had a message for Detective Anderson. That he had to stop, or something bad would happen.”
“According to Grace,” Ralph said, “the first time the man showed up, he looked like he wasn’t done. Not finished. The second time he appeared, she described a man who sure sounds like Claude Bolton. Only he’s in Texas. Make of it what you will.”
“If Bolton’s there, he couldn’t have been here,” Bill Samuels said, sounding exasperated. “That seems pretty obvious.”
“It seemed obvious with Terry Maitland,” Howie said. “And now, we have discovered, with Heath Holmes.” He turned his attention to Holly. “We don’t have Miss Marple tonight, but we do have Ms. Gibney. Can you put these pieces together for us?”
Holly didn’t seem to hear him. She was still staring at a painting on the wall. “Straws for eyes,” she said. “Yes. Sure. Straws . . .” She trailed off.
“Ms. Gibney?” Howie said. “Do you have something for us, or not?”
Holly came back from wherever she had been. “Yes. I can explain what’s going on. All I ask is that you keep an open mind. It will be quicker, I think, if I show you part of a movie I brought. I have it in my bag, on a DVD.”
With another brief prayer for strength (and to channel Bill Hodges when they voiced their disbelief and—perhaps—outrage), she stood up and placed her laptop at the end of the table where Yune’s had been. Then she took out her DVD external drive and hooked it up.
7
Jack Hoskins had considered asking for sick time for his sunburn, emphasizing that skin cancer ran in his family, and decided it was a bad idea. Terrible, in fact. Chief Geller would almost certainly tell him to get out of his office, and when word got around (Rodney Geller wasn’t the close-mouthed sort), Detective Hoskins would become a laughingstock in the department. In the unlikely event that the chief agreed, he would be expected to go to the doctor, and Jack wasn’t ready for that.
He had been called back in three days early, however, which wasn’t fair when his damn vacation had been on the roster board since May. Feeling this made it his right (his perfect right) to turn those three days into what Ralph Anderson would have called a stay-cation, he spent that Wednesday afternoon bar-hopping. By his third stop, he had managed to mostly forget about the spooky interlude out in Canning Township, and by the fourth, he had stopped worrying quite so much about the sunburn, and the peculiar fact that he seemed to have come by it at night.
His fifth stop was at Shorty’s Pub. There he asked the bartender—a very pretty lady whose name now slipped his mind, although not the entrancing length of her legs in tight Wrangler jeans—to look at the back of his neck and tell him what she saw. She obliged.
“It’s a sunburn,” she said.
“Just a sunburn, right?”
“Yeah, just a sunburn.” Then, after a pause: “But a pretty bad one. Got a few little blisters there. You should put some—”
“Aloe on it, yeah. I heard.”
After five vodka-tonics (or maybe it had been six), he drove home at exactly the speed limit, bolt upright and peering over the wheel. Wouldn’t be good to get stopped. The legal limit in this state was .08.
He arrived at the old hacienda about the same time Holly Gibney was beginning her presentation in Howard Gold’s conference room. He stripped to his undershorts, remembered to lock all the doors, and went in the bathroom to tap a kidney that badly needed tapping. With that chore accomplished, he once more used the hand-mirror to check out the back of his neck. Surely the sunburn was getting better by now, probably starting to flake. But no. The burn had turned black. Deep fissures crisscrossed the nape of his neck. Pearly rivulets of pus dribbled from two of them. He moaned, closed his eyes, then opened them again and breathed a sigh of relief. No black skin. No fissures. No pus. But the nape was bright red, and yes, there were some blisters. It didn’t hurt as much to touch it as it had earlier, but why would it, when he had a skinful of Russian anesthetic?
I have to stop drinking so much, he thought. Seeing shit that’s not there is a pretty clear signal. You could even call it a warning.
He had no aloe vera ointment, so he slathered the burn with some arnica gel. That stung, but the pain soon went away (or at least subsided to a dull throb). That was good, right? He took a hand towel to drape over his pillow so it wouldn’t get all stained, lay down, and turned out the light. But the dark was no good. It seemed he could feel the pain more in the dark, and it was all too easy to imagine something in the room with him. The something that had been behind him out there at that abandoned barn.
The only thing out there was my imagination. The way that black skin was my imagination. And the cracks. And the pus.
All true, but it was also true that when he turned on the bedside lamp, he felt better. His final thought was that a good night’s sleep would put everything right.
8
“Do you want me to dim the lights a bit more?” Howie asked.
“No,” Holly said. “This is information, not entertainment, and although the movie is short—only eighty-seven minutes—we won’t need to watch all of it, or even most of it.” She wasn’t as nervous as she had feared she would be. At least not so far. “But before I show it to you, I need to make something very clear, something I think you all must know by now, although you may not be quite ready to admit the truth into your conscious minds.”
They looked at her, silent. All those eyes. She could hardly believe she was doing this—surely not Holly Gibney, the mouse who had sat at the back of all her classrooms, who never raised her hand, who wore her gym clothes under her skirts and blouses on phys ed days. Holly Gibney who even in her twenties hadn’t dared speak back to her mother. Holly Gibney who had actually lost her mind on two occasions.
But all that was before Bill. He trusted me to be better, and for him I was. And I will be now, for these people.
“Terry Maitland didn’t murder Frank Peterson and Heath Holmes didn’t murder the Howard girls. Those murders were committed by an outsider. He uses our modern science—our modern forensics—against us, but his real weapon is our refusal to believe. We’re trained to follow the facts, and sometimes we scent him when the facts are conflicting, but we refuse to follow that scent. He knows it. He uses it.”
“Ms. Gibney,” Jeannie Anderson said, “are you saying the murders were committed by a supernatural creature? Something like a vampire?”
Holly considered the question, biting at her lips. At last she said, “I don’t want to answer that. Not yet. I want to show you some of the movie I brought first. It’s a Mexican film, dubbed in English and released as part of drive-in double features in this country fifty years ago. The English title is Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster, but in Spanish—”
“Oh, come on,” Ralph said. “This is ridiculous.”
“Shut up,” Jeannie said. She kept her voice low, but they all heard the anger in it. “Give her a chance.”
“But—”
“You weren’t there last night. I was. You need to give this a chance.”
Ralph crossed his arms over his chest, just as Samuels had. It was a gesture Holly knew well. A warding-off gesture. An I won’t listen gesture. She pushed on.
“The Mexican title is Rosita Luchadora e Amigas Conocen El Cuco. In Spanish it means—”
“That’s it!” Yune shouted, making them all jump. “That’s the name I couldn’t get when we were eating at that restaurant on Saturday! Do you remember the story, Ralph? The one my wife’s abuela told her when she was just peque?a?”
“How could I forget?” Ralph said. “The guy with the black bag who kills little kids and rubs their fat . . .” He stopped, thinking—in spite of himself—of Frank Peterson and the Howard girls.
“Does what?” Marcy Maitland asked.