Gray Matter (17 page)

Nonsense. Just a cat responding to motion, to creatures she saw as gray and about the size of mice.

The next time she saw Thomas was when he came out and asked if she could drive Winston home. On the way back, after dropping the boy off, she tried to question Thomas about his new friend. All she learned was that Winston lived with his dad, that his mom was in a treatment center someplace, and that Winston was generally thought of as a nerd because he was smart, not athletic, and liked computers.

She could understand why her son had approached this boy. Thomas was an outsider, the new boy in class. Rather than try to push his way into the social circles that existed there, he had circled the outside like a predator—
there’s that word again—
eyeing a herd of antelope, looking for the easy target. It wasn’t an ideal situation, because she felt that Thomas might just be using Winston. But at least they both got some companionship out of it, someone their own age to bum around with. If Winston was as smart as Thomas said he was, then he certainly was able to see right through the sudden friendship. And who knows, maybe the boys would become good friends in spite of their beginnings.

That was yesterday. Today Thomas had been angry, barely speaking to her, barely able to keep his voice civil, his words stinging like sleet driven by a vengeful wind. The ride home from school was silent and tense.

PJ pulled into her driveway, a gravel one almost entirely given over to grass, with two narrow wheel paths still defined. Driveways were an oddity in her neighborhood. Most people had to park on the street. The city lots were too narrow for an attached garage. The occupants of those few homes which had detached garages in the rear were considered uppity, and generally it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The most common sight in the neighborhood, though, was a statue of the Virgin Mary next to the front steps. Most were modestly surrounded with a well-tended flower bed, with bricks set on a slant for edging. A few went so far as to have spotlights set into the lawn, so that Mary was on duty twenty-four hours a day.

Around the back, PJ’s driveway ballooned out into a rough circle, again mostly taken over with grass. She turned the car around and left it pointing back out toward the street. She and Thomas got out at the same time, but she paused to admire the lilies-of-the-valley that were blooming at the base of the birdbath.

“Mom, the door’s open. And you’re the one who’s always telling me to lock up.”

She turned around, but before she could respond, Thomas had shoved the door open and gone into the kitchen.

“Holy shit!” he yelled.

PJ dropped her purse and ran for the doorway. Inside she saw Thomas standing still, staring at the wall. There were letters on the wall, large and crudely drawn, in something red, terribly red, that had dripped down the walls like bloody tears. For some reason she couldn’t make out what the letters spelled, but the implication was clear: someone had been in her home, some sick person had violated her clean white walls.

“Megabite! Where’s Megabite?” Thomas said, his voice cracking. He suddenly took off toward the stairs, and PJ was too far away to grab him.

“Stop!” PJ ordered in her most commanding, professional voice. It worked. Thomas halted on the third step. “Turn around and come back here immediately. We’re going outside to call the police. Whoever did this might still be in the house.”

“Now what?” he said, as they stood in the back yard, staring at the house like it had just fallen there from outer space.

PJ tried to compose herself. She was the adult here. “We’ll both go next door and call from Mrs. Brodsky’s house. Then you’ll stay there until after the police check the house.”

“Like hell I will.”

“Thomas!” Her voice was harsh. She softened it, reached out to touch his hand. “Just go along, OK? Just let me deal with this. Don’t make things harder than they are.”

She walked next door. The yards weren’t fenced, so she simply cut across to Mrs. Brodsky’s back door and knocked. She knew the old woman was slow getting to the door, so she counted to fifty before knocking again. This time she only got to twenty before the door opened.

“Why, hello, Penelope,” Mrs. Brodsky began. Then she took in PJ’s face. “Whatever is wrong, dear? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Mrs. Brodsky, could I please use your phone? My house has been broken into, and I need…I need…”

“Come in. You too, Thomas. I’ll phone for you. It’s ever so easy, now that all you have to do is dial 911.” She ushered them into her kitchen, hands gently guiding, touching PJ’s shoulder, the top of Thomas’s head. PJ let herself be led and coddled, just for a few minutes. Then, after Mrs. Brodsky had placed the call, she dialed Schultz’s number at work. He picked up after the first ring.

“Schultz.”

“Leo, this is PJ. Somebody broke into my house and wrote things on the wall,” she blurted.

“You didn’t go in, did you?”

“Just right inside the kitchen. Then Thomas and I went next door. The neighbor called 911.”

“Good. Stay there. I’ll be right over.”

“Leo? Are you still there?”

“Yeah. What?”

“I’m worried about my cat.”

“Stay put. Let the uniforms go in the house. You hear me?”

It seemed like only moments until two blue-and-white patrol cars pulled up at the curb, but it had been long enough for Mrs. Brodsky to thrust a cup of hot tea in her hands. She heard the woman offer to fix Thomas some hot Ovaltine, heard him decline in a polite but strained voice.

Soon afterward, Schultz’s bulk occupied the center of the kitchen. Mrs. Brodsky orbited, offering tea, but was chased from the room by a glare from Schultz. Thomas wandered outside, under strict orders not to leave Mrs. Brodsky’s yard.

“OK, tell,” Schultz said.

“I left early to pick up Thomas from school. Well, you know that. When we got home, the back door was open. Thomas went inside before I could stop him. On the wall of the kitchen, there’s some writing, big drippy red letters. I don’t know what they spell. Thomas started to go upstairs to look for Megabite. That’s our cat. I stopped him, and we both came over here to Mrs. Brodsky’s.”

“The boy shouldn’t have gone inside,” Schultz said gruffly. “Could’ve taken a bellyful of shot or a knife in the throat.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” PJ flared.

“All right, take it easy,” Schultz said.

“That writing—it’s red. Do you think maybe,” PJ swallowed and lowered her voice, although she and Schultz were the only ones in the room, “it’s cat’s blood?”

“I hope not. I’m going over to talk to the uniforms, make sure the house is empty. You stay here.”

“No, I want to come.”

Schultz sighed. “Suit yourself. You will, anyway.”

They walked over to the house and Schultz consulted with the two patrolmen who had remained outside. As he was talking with them, the other two came out the back door.

“Nobody there,” one of them said. “Writing on the kitchen wall, some smashed equipment in one of the other rooms downstairs.”

Schultz nodded and headed for the door. PJ quickly caught up with him, and found that Thomas was right at her elbow.

Schultz stepped inside and stood, gazing at the two-foot-high letters, now almost obscured by the watery tracks the liquid made running down the wall. Then, to PJ’s horror, he walked over, stuck his finger in the red stuff and sucked it noisily into his mouth.

“Ketchup,” he said. “You really ought to get that thick kind that doesn’t drip.”

It was decided to have an Evidence Technician Unit come out to photograph the wall and dust for fingerprints in the kitchen and study, especially around the smashed computer. Schultz didn’t think that the break-in was associated with the investigation of the murders, but he decided not to take that chance. The ETU came and went, doing their jobs quickly and professionally.

“So you think some neighborhood punk broke in here?” PJ asked.

“Some semi-literate punk who just got the urge to trash someplace.”

“And that’s your considered professional opinion?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I don’t think much of it. Why…”

“Mom,” Thomas interrupted, “can I look for Megabite now that the ETU’s gone?”

“Of course. I’ll help you,” she answered before Schultz could get a word in. “Let’s try the bedrooms. I think she would have been too scared to stay down here.”

They went upstairs and separated. She was on her knees looking under a dresser when she heard Thomas.

“Mom, I found her!”

A moment later: “Yuck! She’s got crap all over her rear end.”

She grabbed a towel from the bathroom on her way into Thomas’s room. He was sitting on the bed, cradling the young cat, oblivious now to the mess and smell. She sat down next to him and wrapped the cat in the bath towel, holding it on her lap. Megabite purred softly and began kneading the terry cloth with her paws, pulling up little picks in the material.

Relief settled in, and PJ felt her shoulders sag. Her mouth was dry, and she swallowed a couple of times. She hadn’t realized how much she had come to care for this cat in just a few days. Now a rush of memories came: how the cat greeted her when she got home, a delicate scratchy-tongued lick on the cheek in the middle of the night, the tooth marks in the corner of a magazine that had been knocked off the counter during a midnight frolic. Thomas was obviously attached, too.

“Where was she?”

“I looked in the closet, and I noticed that I had left the little door to the attic open,” he said. Each upstairs closet had a door in the back, about four feet high, to access the storage space under the eaves. “She came right out when I called her. Oh, Mom, she’s OK.” His eyes filled with tears and he leaned against her shoulder, suddenly twelve, suddenly frightened. “Something awful could have happened,” he said, so low that she could barely hear. “I saw that red stuff on the walls…”

“Don’t think about that anymore, sweetie,” she said, hugging him. “I was worried about the same thing. But Megabite’s just fine.” She stroked the cat’s head, and Megabite responded by bumping up under PJ’s hand. “A little smelly, though.”

He drew back a little, the expression on his face cycling between relief and worry. “Yeah. I’ll help with the bath this time.”

She pulled her son in and rested her cheek on the top of his head. “I’m so glad we’re all OK. Something like this can be pretty scary.” It was an invitation for him to talk, but he didn’t, so she continued. “At least now I’ll have an excuse to get a new desktop computer. That other one was a real dinosaur.” A thought occurred to her, and she pulled herself away. “Here. You hold Megabite. I need to go back downstairs to talk to Leo.”

PJ stopped in her own bedroom to check the contents of the closet before going downstairs.

“Sit down, Doc,” he said. He sat heavily in one of the swivel chairs, the one that faced the vandalized wall, leaving PJ to sit with her back to the wall. She noticed small things like that.

“We found the cat, upstairs in the attic.”

Schultz nodded, his face unreadable.

“Leo, I’m worried. What if Thomas and I had been home?”

“Then the vandal wouldn’t have come in. Creeps like that like to leave their mark behind and get out, they don’t like an audience while they’re trashing a place.”

“So you still think it was a vandal? Not related to the investigation?”

Schultz pursed his lips and blew air out noisily. “To tell you the truth, I’m puzzled. I can’t see a clear relationship to the case, but I can’t rule it out either.”

“It looks to me like someone came in here specifically to smash the computer. That means he knew I had a computer in the first place. He didn’t know about the laptop, though—it’s still up in the bedroom closet, untouched.”

Schultz didn’t respond. He was staring at the writing on the wall.

“Another thing. I have this hunch about the cat. She acted exactly the same as she did when she was in Burton’s apartment. She got so frightened that she soiled herself, and then hid until the whole thing was over.”

“So? Cats do that kind of stuff all the time.”

“No, they don’t. Not this cat, anyway. Something really bad scared her, something that she remembered, poor thing. I think the same person was in my house.” She paused, struck by what she had said. “I think the killer was here, right here in this room.”

“You’re wrong,” Schultz interrupted.

“How do you know that?” PJ said. “I know it’s only a hunch, but I think it’s…”

“No, no, not you. That’s what the letters say:
you’re wrong,
spelled Y-U-R-R-O-N-G.”

“Oh. Wrong about what?”

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this. When you combine the message with the bashed-up computer, it seems like somebody’s trying to tell you that you’re on the wrong track with the computer simulation.”

“That seems plausible.”

“Well, that means somebody—the killer—knows that computers are involved in the investigation. Knows that you’re working on the case. That hasn’t been given out to the media yet, I’m sure of that. So how would the killer know?”

“Are you thinking that the killer could be someone in the Department?”

“Christ, I hope not. But cops have flipped out before.”

“What if it’s Howard? He knows everything we’ve been doing.”

Schultz snorted. “Not a chance. I know for a fact that he upchucks at the sight of a little gore. Got a weak stomach, never got used to it in all his years on the force. Maybe you haven’t noticed his absence from both of the crime scenes, but I have. It’s common knowledge.”

“Maybe that’s just a cover.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever been on
the
receiving end of his lunch.”

“No.” PJ laughed nervously. “No, I suppose I wouldn’t. Who else, then?”

“Don’t know. I’ll look into it, though. But the whole thing could be unrelated to the killings. Could be the creep is a neighborhood punk who did this on a dare and is out there laughing at us now. You know, rattle the new person who just moved in. Kind of like the 90’s version of toilet papering a house. Come to think of it, has your son hooked up with anybody strange?”