Shattered (7 page)

The Hillbilly smiled, revealing a row of green, rotting teeth like tiny tombstones. He pulled a massive bowie knife from his belt and commenced cleaning the dirt from under one of his yellow nails.

“I'm still listenin'…”

The next day, Grove's little colonial two-story was awash in the laughter of women. Vida made a big deal out of how huge the baby had gotten in the months since she had laid eyes on him. For most of the afternoon Vida sat in the bentwood rocker in the living room and bounced the plump little infant on her knee. She cooed Swahili lullabies to him in a hoarse voice that sounded like Tiny Tim with a hangover, while Grove shuttled back and forth from the kitchen, doing the prep work on an elaborate dinner. Maura looked on with weary amusement, every once in a while asking Vida about life in Chicago, her diabetes, her parakeet, and her back problems.

Grove had a hard time concentrating on all this while he basted his Greek chicken. He could usually lose himself in his cooking—he was practically a three-star chef—but not today. Today he went through the motions of roasting the garlic and making the lemon-rosemary reduction and adding the cornmeal to the bits of rendered bacon while ruminating on the Mississippi Ripper. Gliane's rapid DNA tests on the St. Louis scene had been inconclusive. More tests were being conducted. Grove had been compulsively checking his e-mails all day, but nothing had come through yet. They would come soon enough, and they would match up with somebody, and Grove would find this mother. Very soon.

It was all Grove could think about anymore. Which was fine. Perfectly fine. As long as he didn't discuss it with his wife. He knew Maura was at her wits' end with Grove's workaholism, but that was okay because Grove could segregate the different parts of his life into compartments in his brain. When he was home, he would not talk about his work. He would keep his file folders locked up in his office credenza. All the gruesome crime scene photographs and diagrams of entry wounds and pathology reports and horrendous details of off-the-scale madness were tucked into secret slots. His family would never come into contact with it. His wife and child were safe. When Grove was home he was a doting father and a loving husband…and now a dutiful son.

“Mom?” He called out from the kitchen. “Can I get you a glass of wine?”

“In a minute, Uly,” she replied. “Right now Granny must go out and smoke one of her nasty cigarettes.”

Grove went over to the threshold of the living room and watched his rheumatoid mother heft herself out of the rocker and hand the baby back to Maura. Then Vida creaked and shuffled across the room toward the front door. Grove wiped his hands on a towel, then turned and followed his mom outside.

They both sat down on a wrought-iron bench that was nestled in a patch of morning glories. At length Vida snubbed out her filterless Camel on the bench's leg. Sparks fell into the flower bed. “I have not been completely truthful with you, Uly, I must tell you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The truth…” Her voice trailed off. She seemed to be groping for words.

“Uh-huh.” Grove waited patiently. He didn't know exactly what was coming…but he had an idea.

Best not to rush it.

At last Vida looked at him with her sad, soulful eyes. “You are in danger, Mwana.”

“Hmmm.”

“I cannot explain how I know this, but I do, I know you are in danger.”

After a long pause Grove asked her if
that
was the real reason she came down to Virginia, to warn him.

“I am afraid so…yes.”

Grove looked at her. “More visions?”

“Yes.”

“Figured that was the case.”

Vida looked worried. “After all we have been through, you're still the great skeptic?”

“I didn't say that.” Grove kept his gaze leveled at her. “I'd be an idiot not to take your visions seriously, Mom. It's just that…”

Now it was Grove's voice that trailed off.

Vida waited. “Yes, Mwana?”

Grove looked into her eyes. “I'm supposed to be in danger, Mom. That's the way it works. We've talked about this. You've seen it. Whether it's my bloodline, my destiny, whatever. This is what I'm supposed to do.”

“I never said—”

“There are people out there, Mom, people with one prime directive—”

“Uly—”

“These people are rare. Okay? Thank God. But they're out there. They feed off pain and misery and death. And they have to be weeded out and removed, and I know how to do it. I don't know why it happened but it did. I was born into this.” He softened then, and he put his hand on her bony brown arm. “You were the one who taught me that.”

Vida looked at him. “I understand all this, Mwana, believe me, I do.”

“Then what's the problem?”

She licked her gray lips. “It is not only you who are in danger this time, Uly.”

Grove stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“It's your family this time.”

A stab of dread ran through Grove's guts like a hot poker. “My family?”

Vida nodded slowly, deliberately, her gray eyes glinting in the failing light.

The dinner hour came and went in a series of awkward silences, and once again the Grove household settled down for the night. By eleven o'clock, Ulysses Grove found himself alone in the kitchen, sitting at the island counter, drumming his fingers on the marble top, watching his cell phone as though it might sprout wings and take flight at any moment. It sat on the counter in front of him, next to the remnants of the night's dinner, the wadded napkins, the polenta-crusted plates, and water rings. Moonlight streamed in through the Levolor blinds and, under an adjacent counter, a single fluorescent tube added a cold blue cast to the room. Grove kept staring at that infernal wireless phone.

A watched pot never boils.

A watched cell phone never rings.

Grove was about to crawl out of his skin with nervous energy. Still nothing conclusive from Gliane at the Bureau lab. No results. No DNA matches. And now Vida had dropped her bombshell that Grove's family was in danger, and it might have something to do with the Mississippi Ripper, but she had been maddeningly vague. Grove had prodded her, demanded to know what the hell she was talking about. But all she could tell him was that it had come to her in a vision, another vision, something about a shadowy figure on the edge of a desert. How the hell was Grove supposed to use
that
little nugget of information? Go station a surveillance van at the local beach? Stake out the sand traps at the local golf course?

“What are you doing?”

Maura's voice startled him, and he turned with a jerk. “Oh…sorry…I was just…thinking.”

“Thinking, huh?” She crossed the threshold of the kitchen, her bare feet padding silently on the cool adobe tiles. Maura was draped in an oversize fleece sweatshirt, nude underneath, and her porcelain pale flesh looked almost luminous in the gloom. “I was doing a little bit of that myself.” She paused at the end of the island, hands on her bony hips. “Always a dangerous proposition, all this thinking going on.”

Grove turned back to his vigil with the cell phone. “I promise you my mom'll only be here for a few days.”

“She can stay as long as she likes.” Maura rubbed her neck. “That's not the problem.”

“There's a problem?”

She let out a big sigh. “God, no. What gave you that idea?”

“What's on your mind, Mo?”

“That.”
She pointed at the cell phone as though it were a termite infestation. “We've talked about this, Uly…how many times now?”

Grove shrugged. He knew this was coming, and yet he felt an odd sort of fatalistic calm. He had segregated these components of his life so rigidly that they now felt like different TV stations in his head. He had just been enjoying the Rattled Criminologist Show and now, as abruptly as the click of a remote, he was tuning into the Henpecked Husband Hour. He wiped his eyes. “Tell me we're not gonna go through this again.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, Ulysses.” Maura spoke evenly, a trace of weariness in her voice. “We agreed the weeknights are ours.”

“I'm here, aren't I?”

“Actually you're still on the banks of the Mississippi.”

He looked at her. “You know how close I am to grabbing this guy?”

“And you
will
, I have no doubt.”

“Then what's the problem?”

A long pause here, Maura letting out another sigh and trying to put something very thorny and complex into words. After a moment she said, “Maybe I'm feeling a little needy tonight.” Her voice softened. She came around the counter, and she put a hand on Grove's tense shoulder. “Postpartum dragons rearing their ugly heads again maybe.”

“Maura—”

“I know what I signed up for, Uly. I know you're going to catch this one.” She came around behind him and put her arms around him. “Matter of fact, I'm planning on doing an article about it for Graydon over at
Vanity Fair
. It's not the job. You know I'm proud of the job. I'm just asking you to give it a break for one measly night.”

Grove drank in her scent, the powdery melange of lotion, milk, patchouli oil, and sweat. He closed his eyes. Cradled her hands against his chest. “You're right. I'm sorry.” He closed his eyes, leaning his head against hers. He could detect a faint hint of cigarette smoke. “You're absolutely right.”

She gently turned him around, faced him. Her nipples had stiffened under her nightshirt. The gray cotton material clung to her now. “Aaron's out like a light,” she said, reaching up and touching Grove's grizzled brown cheek. Her hand was warm on his face. Her breath smelled of toothpaste and musk. “And your mom's dozing in the rocker in his room.”

“Mom's asleep?” Grove said, his nerve endings down in his solar plexus waking up.

“Dead to the world,” Maura whispered, planting a kiss on Grove's neck, then under his ear.

“Hmmm.”

“Let's turn the phones off,” she uttered, nibbling Grove's earlobe, flicking her tongue across his ear.

“Best idea I've heard all day.”

“You know me, always thinking.”

“An honest-to-goodness genius.” He put his hands under her sweatshirt and found her heavy bosom. He kissed her, his tongue probing, his hands cupping her warm, swollen breasts. His erection strained at the seams of his boxers. “I'm nominating you for the Nobel.”

“Mmmmmmm…put the cell phone on vibrate, Uly.” A tiny, slender hand squeezed his crotch. “Then put it between my legs and call me.”

One hand still on her breast, he fumbled blindly in the moonlight for the cell phone. He snatched it up and thumbed it into the silent mode.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he told himself he would check it before he fell asleep that night.

“Do me on the family room floor.”

Their lips stayed locked as they edged their way across the kitchen wall, knocking a bowl of apples to the floor. Grove's shoulder nudged the wall phone off the hook. The receiver dangled as apples rolled across the tiles.

They stole down the basement steps, pulling off each other's clothes.

 

By 3:00
A.M.
the stillness that precedes the dawn had plunged the house into a deep, dark well of silence. The drone of crickets and cicadas outside had dwindled now until only the ceaseless cycling of the central air conditioner stirred the tomblike quiet of the two-story.

On the second floor, three souls slumbered deeply, barely making breathing noises.

Maura, nestled in her customary tangle of sheets, lay in the darkness of the master bedroom. She dreamt a fragmented mosaic of images, sensations, fleshy moments from Aaron's birth; a strange nude shopping expedition; and a disturbing vignette of her husband accompanying her to a funeral of an old high school friend. At the visitation, Ulysses excused himself and went up to the altar, where the closed casket sat on its flowered bier. He glanced over his shoulder, and then inexplicably opened the coffin and climbed in. Instead of a body, there were stairs inside the enclosure, and Grove descended those stairs into the dark unknown until Maura finally rolled over and fell into sub-REM sleep.

Outside her door, down the second-floor hallway, in the darkness of the baby's room, two separate noises ebbed and flowed in syncopated rhythm: Vida's soft snore and little Aaron's quick, faint sleep breaths.

Swaddled in a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, his downy hair shimmering in the moonlight streaming through the blinds, the baby was curled against the side of the crib, fetal style, tiny moist thumb in his mouth. Across the room, Vida slumped in the rocker, her leathery brown face lolled to one side. A Pennsylvania Dutch quilt tented her lap—Maura had draped it over her earlier that night—and now Vida's ancient adenoids and nasal passages burbled noisily as she slept.

Vida's dreams had a mythic quality, as though they were stanzas from a book, or dark biblical psalms. She dreamed of Africa, of her arid little village, of miles and miles and miles of dead, shriveled, black baobab trees. She dreamed of a demon on a black horse tearing through a hamlet of grass huts, trailing fire from its tail like golden ribbons. And she dreamed of her baby boy, her little beautiful baby boy, wandering into the dark distance of the Chalbi at sunset. It was a moment burned into her subconscious: the little brown child in a stained potato-sack tunic, head cocked high and brave, vanishing into a black hole of shadows as deep and opaque as a solar eclipse.

But at some point in this macabre recurring dream, for the first time ever, Vida caught a glimpse of something new: Just before disappearing into the void, the boy turned and glanced over his shoulder. For the briefest moment he gazed back at his dreaming mother.

The boy's face was inhuman: contorted with rage, cut with deep creases, eyes as yellow as a jackal's.

The image nearly rattled Vida awake, but not quite. She merely snorted, repositioned herself on the rocker, and burrowed her gray, nappy head deeper into the throw pillow that Maura had gently placed there hours earlier. Within minutes she was snoring again.

All of this went fairly unnoticed by the only semiconscious individual in the house.

Grove lay in his underwear, two stories down, on the sofa in the basement, tossing and turning in the silent shadows. His notebook was on the floor next to him. Only a couple of hours earlier, on that same sofa, he had made fierce love to his wife. Afterward they had lain there for quite some time, contentedly talking of ordinary things, household things, their bodies clammy, their sweat cooling in the dank cellar. Maura had finally excused herself to go check on the baby. Grove decided to open his notebook back up and make some more notes on the Ripper profile. When Maura didn't return, Grove figured she must have dozed off up there. Probably for the best. This way, Grove wouldn't bother her with his compulsive chicken scratching in his notebook.

Now, Grove had been wavering in and out of slumber for what seemed like an eternity.

Sleep had always come uneasily to Grove. When he was involved in a case, it came over him like a poorly tuned shortwave radio station, gradually washing over the noise of his thoughts in fits and starts. When he was off duty, or on vacation, or spending a rare holiday with his family, it came even harder. He would stare at the ceiling for hours, thinking of work, thinking of what he
should
be doing. The doctors have a phrase for people like Grove.

Slow sleepers.

Which is why he was partially awake when the first noise came drifting across the backyard.

At first, it hardly registered. In fact, Grove wasn't even sure how long he had been listening to it. It sounded like a branch tossing in the wind out in the woods beyond the property line or maybe leaves rustling. He tried to ignore it, rolling over and pressing his uncooperative eyes shut. But the noise persisted.

It was muffled and distant, but it seemed to be changing shape, coming into focus, refining itself. It had an awkward rhythm, like a faint snapping noise, a jittery tattoo…and as it clarified itself in Grove's groggy ears, he became aware of something vaguely troubling about it.

It seemed to be approaching the house.