Richard Montanari (27 page)

    As a
rule, criminals have no idea who the people are who plug away in forensic labs
all over the world and how dedicated they are to rooting out the truth. If they
did know, they wouldn't be so cavalier about leaving at their crime scenes any
one of the million skin cells or hundreds of hairs we shed every day, not to
mention saliva, footprints, blood, or fibers from clothing.

    As
Jessica got into the car she also thought about how her job sometimes resembled
an episode of
The X-Files.

    
These
samples are definitely not human
.

    Byrne
parked across the street from the Mount Olive Cemetery. He had stopped by the
main office, spoken to the night security officer. Considering what had
happened there that day, he didn't need a trigger happy ex-PPD freaking out
about the man standing in the middle of the graveyard.

    He
thought about the vision he had gotten when he had been here before. What did
it all mean?

    He
tried to add up the hours of sleep he had missed in the past week, but
couldn't. The weight of his exhaustion prevented him from making an accurate
accounting.

    Byrne
laid his head back on the seat. Just for a moment. Just a moment of peace.

    Sleep
came quickly. In the dream he was in a vast concert hall, the only person
sitting in the audience. Onstage was a full philharmonic orchestra. He looked
around the elegant surroundings. The floor was slicked with blood. On each seat
was a severed finger.

    He
jumped to his feet as the music swelled, ran up the aisle to the lobby. On one
wall of the lobby were two words written in bright red blood:

    Byrne
ran from the hall, down the sidewalks, where everyone had the face of a victim
he knew, a case he had investigated. He found his van in an otherwise empty
parking lot. He jumped in, his heart racing fit to burst. He noticed the smell
immediately. He turned around to find a decomposing body posed in the back,
shaved and hairless, its eyes open, familiar eyes—

    Byrne
sat upright in the driver's seat, the perspiration slicking his body despite
the chill in the air. Outside, the city of Philadelphia was pitch black and
silent, the only sounds the occasional car trolling by. Around him the dead
were still dead.

    He
got out of the van, breathing in deeply the cold night air.

    
You
know
.

    He
looked at his watch.

    It
was 2:52.

    Wednesday,
October 27

    Lucy
spent the morning on autopilot, her emotions racing between approach and
avoidance. Neither of these were terms that she had ever used in relationship
to her state of mind until she had started seeing psychologists. They had a
different way of speaking, those people, a wholly separate dictionary. For
instance, you didn't just recall something, you had
declarative memory.
Or when you applied simple logic to problems, and solved them, it was called
fluid intelligence.
And then there was her favorite. If you were the kind
of person who defined yourself by your own thoughts or actions, you weren't
just confident, or happy in your own skin. No, no, no. You had
independent construals
of self.

    Lucy
almost laughed. Her inside joke - on those rare occasions when she felt good
enough to appreciate a joke, inside or out - was that she was just going
through her construal cycle.

    Regardless,
on this day, in this place, Lucy was all but overcome by her new feelings. The
craziest thing had been running into Detective Byrne the day before. She had
been so hyper when she saw him that, even though she knew that she knew him,
she didn't realize who he was. Until he smiled.

    They
had met at her regression-therapy sessions. He was the man in the group who had
been dead for a whole minute. They'd gone for coffee once, shared their
experiences. Well, Lucy had listened mostly, because she didn't really know
what had happened to her. Yesterday he had given her his card and told her to
call if she ever wanted to talk. She wondered if he could help her. She
wondered if he would laugh at her suspicions of the man she thought she'd seen
come out of Room 1208. No, he wouldn't laugh, but he
would
probably tell
her she was imagining things.

    As
she worked she looked at her watch every five minutes, for the first time in a
long while not really gauging her day by how many rooms she had completed,
mentally recording the time she entered and left.

    Each
room attendant had their own section key, an electronic card similar to a guest
key, that allowed them access to their rooms but not to other parts of the
hotel. If an attendant said they entered a room at 9:08 and it was really 9:21,
management could find it out in a second. A lot of dismissed attendants found
out the hard way that computers never lie. The lock didn't say when you left,
only when you entered.

    Today
all the rooms blended together, and Lucy had no idea how long it was taking her
to finish each one.

    
He
smelled like apples
.

    That
could have been anything, though. There were a million plausible explanations
for this. Lots of people wear dark overcoats. For gosh sake, even Detective
Byrne wore a dark overcoat.

    Lucy
stood at the end of the hallway, near the elevators. She looked down the
corridor, at the east wing. In this direction there were eight rooms. Rooms
1201 through 1208. Today she was able to swap this wing with a girl who worked
on the seventh floor, promising to fix the girl's portable CD player in
exchange for the favor. But it would only be for today. Lucy would have to
enter Room 1208 tomorrow. She wasn't looking forward to it.

    When
she rounded the corner at the back to the hotel she saw her friend Amanda
sitting on a delivery pallet, eating a tangerine.

    'Hey,
girl,' Amanda said.

    'Hi.'
Lucy sat down next to Amanda. Amanda Cuaron was everything Lucy was not.
Exotic, dark-eyed, a true Latin beauty, always flirting. Whenever Amanda was
around Lucy felt like a rubber tulip.

    'Hey,
I forgot to ask, did you see that guy yesterday?' Amanda asked.

    
That
guy
was the Dreamweaver. Mr. Costa. Lucy wasn't sure how much she wanted to
tell Amanda. Amanda was her friend and all, but Lucy had never shared secrets
with her. She'd never shared her secrets with anyone. 'Yeah,' she said. 'I saw
him.'

    'How
did it go?'

    'It
went okay.'

    Amanda
just stared at her - she was not going to get off the hook with such a brief
explanation. 'Well? Was he weird? Did he wear a pointy hat and carry a wand?'

    'Oh
yeah,' Lucy said. 'And he had a long white beard. Didn't I mention the beard?'

    Amanda
smiled. 'Is he cute?'

    Lucy
snorted. 'Shut
up.
He's like a hundred years old.'

    'Is
he cute?'

    Lucy
just rolled her eyes. 'I'm going to see him again today.' Lucy hadn't realized
that she'd made the decision to do this until this second.

    Amanda
smiled her lascivious smile. 'Mala
chica.'

    They
both checked their watches at the same moment. They had another six minutes.

    Amanda
pointed to the wall next to the delivery bay. There was something carved into
the stone.
RL loves TJ.

    'I
wonder if they're still in love,' Amanda said.

    Lucy
doubted it. She didn't believe in true love. 'Well, it
is
written in
stone.'

    Amanda
laughed. 'I think that was probably done back when this place was apartments.'

    'When
was this an apartment building?'

    'I
think up until maybe 1999. Something like that,' she said. 'I think it was kind
of a famous place, too.'

    'How
so?'

    .'Well,
mostly because of that little girl. You know about that, don't you?'

    'What
are you talking about?'

    'I'm
not a hundred percent sure what happened - you could ask Sergio. He'd definitely
know.'

    Sergio
was an older guy who worked in maintenance. He had been with the building for a
long time.

    'But,
from what I understand, a little girl got killed here,' Amanda added.

    Lucy
shuddered. 'What do you mean, killed? Like an accident or something?'

    'No.
Like
killed
killed.'

    'What
are you saying? She was
murdered?'

    'Yeah.'
Amanda wiggled her fingers at Lucy, made spooky Halloween noises. 'They say her
ghost walks these very halls.'

    'Stop
it.'

    Amanda
giggled. 'You're so easy.'

    'How
old was the girl?'

    Amanda
shrugged, peeled off another section of tangerine, offered it to Lucy. Lucy
declined. 'Not sure. But not too old, though. Ten or eleven, maybe.'

    'How
did she ... you know.'

    'How
did she die?' Amanda shrugged. 'No idea. But I don't think they ever caught the
guy that did it.'

    As
creepy as Lucy already felt today, the feeling had just doubled.

    'I
think it's one of the cases this bunch of nut jobs who are staying here this
week are investigating,' Amanda said. 'Or talking about investigating. God only
knows what they do.'

    Lucy
was speechless for the moment. Amanda stood up, threw her tangerine peels in
the nearby Dumpster.

    'So,
are we on?' Amanda asked.

    At first
Lucy didn't know what Amanda was talking about. Then she remembered. She had
told Amanda that she would go out with her for a drink at Fluid, a dance club
on Fourth Street, on Halloween Eve Night - always a crazy time in Philly, to
say the least - and, according to Amanda, a ton of cute college guys always
showed up. This year they were probably all going to be dressed up like Robert
Pattinson.

    'Yeah,'
Lucy said. 'Why not?'

    'Awesome.
And you are definitely going to let me do something with your hair. We've got
to babe you up,
chica.
Maybe get you laid.'

    '
Amanda
.'

    Amanda
giggled. 'I'll be by your mansion around eight.'

    'Cool
beans.'

    Amanda
walked back into the hotel but Lucy stayed put. She couldn't stop thinking
about the little girl Amanda had mentioned.
Murdered.
At the place Lucy
worked.
She had to find out more about it, although she wasn't sure why.
Maybe because there was a dead zone in her own life. Maybe it was because for
the past nine years she had felt a dark kinship with all young girls who had
been touched by evil. They were her sisters.

    
They
say her ghost walks these very halls
.

    
Thanks,
Amanda, Lucy thought. Thanks a lot
.

    Doylestown
was a quaint township of about eight thousand in Bucks County. The Ulrich Art
Supply store was a standalone building, a converted ivy-veined coach house on
North Main Street, across the road from the Mercer Square Shopping Center. The
front windows held a display of paints, canvases, brushes, easels. Halloween
decorations ringed the window and door.