What the Night Knows (30 page)

Almost halfway to the scene, shock halted him when two people leaped from the opening where the enormous window had been, as if confident of their ability to fly. In the first instant of the fall, however, John realized the girl was the captive of the man, fighting to escape him even as ruthless gravity ensured that her struggle to survive
would be futile. Upon his first glimpse of her high in the night, he knew her by her long blond hair, by her yellow blouse and blue jeans. He had seen many terrible things in his life, but this plunge was as much an abomination as any. For a fraction of their plummet, the flywheel of time seemed to cycle more slowly than usual, and they appeared to come down with an eerie grace. It was possible to think, to pray, that because of some fluke in the laws of physics, they would sink like a stone through water, not like a stone through air, and touch down in the manner of circus aerialists,
en pointe
and with flourishes. This brief illusion was dispelled by an acceleration that John could clearly see. When they met the pavement, the sound resembled a distant detonation, the
whump
of a mortar round shaking the earth just beyond a hill.

Over the years, John had investigated several suicides that might have been murders, and two were jumpers. They had dispatched themselves from heights less than this, ninety feet in one case, a hundred in the other, but this must be 130 feet or more. In each case, the cadaver was recognizably human but not recognizable as the person whom it had once been. Depending on angle of impact, the skeleton snapped and folded—or bloomed—in unpredictable ways. The cracked pelvis could be compressed into the rib cage. The spinal column might become a pike, piercing the head instead of supporting it. For an instant, breaking bones became clashing swords. Even if the jumper did not land on his head, the stress of impact translated upward through the compacting body, reconfiguring the facial bones until the structural incongruity could be greater than that in a portrait by Picasso.

Had the pair fallen eleven stories into sandy earth or into dense feathery shrubs, they might have had one chance in a thousand of surviving. But at such velocity, stopping abruptly on concrete, they
were as doomed as bugs encountering the windshield of a speeding car. The presence of skilled medical personnel mere steps from the point of impact mattered no more than the sea of air that torn lungs could not process.

Although no aid could resuscitate the dead, John’s reaction to the
whump
at the end of the fall surprised him. Over a hundred feet from the impact site, less than a hundred from his Ford, he turned and sprinted toward the car. He wasn’t fleeing from the intolerable fact of Davinia’s death or from the horror of looking upon her and her equally pulverized assassin. Neither was he concerned about the ramifications of his presence here when he was supposedly on unpaid leave and removed from all police work. He had never before in his life run from anything.

He didn’t fully comprehend the reason for his flight until he was behind the wheel, turning the key in the ignition. The kamikaze who killed himself in order to murder Davinia, the jumper, must have been in the condition of Billy Lucas when the boy wasted his family. A puppet. A glove in which the hand of Alton Blackwood was concealed. In the fall or at the moment of death, the controlling spirit might become disembodied once more. John did not know how it traveled, what rules limited its journeying in this world, if any. He had brought it home from the state hospital without, as far as he knew, hosting it in his body. It seemed to be able to attach itself to a place—a hospital, a car, a house—as readily as it could enter and conquer a person. Or
some
people. The previous afternoon, he felt its absence in his home, an elevation of mood, the return of the former sense of harmony. If he could escape the hospital grounds without bringing the spirit, it might find its way to his home without hitching itself to him, but at least he wouldn’t be responsible for its return.

Madness. Running from a ghost though he would never run from a man with a gun.

He popped the hand brake. Shifted gears. Tramped the accelerator hard. The car shot north along St. Joseph’s driveway. Bounced through a drainage swale. The street. No traffic. He hung a hard left, tires squealing.

Terror and pity speared his heart. All reason abandoned, he was in the fevered grip of savage superstition.

Or maybe modern society was a cave of noise and frantic motion, in which primitives congratulated themselves on their knowledge and reason, when in fact they had forgotten more truth than they learned, had abandoned true sophistication for the lighter burden of studied ignorance, trading reason for the cold comfort of ideology, for the promise that the sound and fury of life signified nothing.

Even for this late hour, the avenues seemed strangely still, as if the entire populace had perished. No moving vehicles in sight. No pedestrians. Not a single homeless insomniac pushing a shopping cart full of junk possessions toward some hallucinated shelter. Nothing moved except steam rising from the slots in a manhole cover, numbers changing on a digital clock above the entrance to a bank, a flying saucer spinning on a giant automated billboard, a cat slinking along the sidewalk and vanishing into an alleyway, and the Ford racing away from what could not be escaped.…

They must all be dead, not just Davinia. Jack, Brenda, Lenny, perhaps even the aunt. In retrospect, John realized that the jumper, who carried the girl to her death, had been wearing a uniform. The patrol car parked in the portico. Perhaps one of the responders to the original call from the Woburn house had become a vehicle for Blackwood after Reese Salsetto failed him.

Two families slaughtered. Two more marked for destruction. Sixty-six days to prepare to defend his wife and his children against an irresistible force.

Easing up on the accelerator, he pulled to a stop at the curb and parked on a street of pricey shops and posh restaurants.

Suddenly the sedan seemed confining. He threw open the driver’s door, got out. He walked a few steps forward from the car and leaned against a parking meter.

In memory, Davinia Woburn stood before him in the ICU visitors’ lounge, and he tried to hold fast to that radiant image of the girl. Inevitably, the lounge dissolved into a memory of the rain of glass and the plummeting pair, Davinia’s hair unfurling like a pale flag, the brutal impact and the bodies seeming to spill like a viscous oil across the pavement.

Holding the parking meter with one hand, he leaned forward and vomited into the gutter. He could purge his stomach, but he could not expel from memory the image of the girl plunging to her death.

36

THE RIDER INTENTLY WATCHES DAVINIA’S TERROR-STRICKEN face on the way down from the eleventh floor and dismounts Officer Andy Tane a fraction of a second before impact. It reels back along the line of their fall like a yo-yo coming home on its string, returning through the missing window. Three hospital security guards, having broken down the conference-room door, stand paralyzed by shock, astonished that the patrolman has leaped to his death with the girl in his arms.

No human structure in this world provides a solid barrier to the rider. All made by man is porous and accommodating. The rider enters the conference-room floor and travels swiftly through the walls and ceilings, through pipes and cables and conduits, wherever it wishes. Anything ever built by human hands is sufficiently infused with human spirit to sustain a haunting presence, to anchor the spirit to this world. This rider in particular feeds on the human spirit. Now the hospital is its surrogate body until it selects another man or woman, every steel beam a bone, Sheetrock its flesh. Without a horse, it has no eyes but still sees, has no ears but nevertheless hears. It
watches, listens, learns, and prowls, an immaterial ghoul in a material world, with the numerous hungers of corrupted human nature but with other and more ferocious hungers of its own.

A patient pushes a call button for the nurse—and is known. A nurse closes the door to a pharmacy closet—and is known. An orderly opens the door to a supply room, a maintenance man wipes a bathroom mirror, a weary resident internist in the ER sits in a chair and leans his head back against the wall, a night-shift systems engineer taps a gauge on a basement boiler—and they are known better than anyone else in this world knows them, more completely than they will ever know themselves.

Some of these people are not vulnerable, cannot be taken and ridden. Others have enough weaknesses—or one weakness so profound—that they can be mounted. None of them appeals to the rider. The police swarm the building, and some are interesting. TV, radio, and newspaper reporters gather in the portico, a potential pool of fine horses.

The hospital administrator, Dr. Harvey Leopold, arrives with one objective, to ensure the reputation of St. Joseph’s isn’t damaged by the murders. A public-relations whiz, Leopold doesn’t keep the press waiting in the cold night, but instructs hospital security to welcome them into the lobby for a press conference. Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives, participates in this event only because he can’t persuade Dr. Leopold to delay it an hour in order that the facts of the case can be more fully ascertained and marshaled.

During the remarks by the two men and during the question-and-answer session that follows, the rider cruises the city press corps, seeking opportunities to know them. It samples quite a few before settling on Roger Hodd of the
Daily Post
.

Hodd is an alcoholic with a mean streak, a narcissist, and a
woman-hater. He has alienated his adult children. His first two wives despise and revile him, and the feeling is mutual. He expects his current wife to file for divorce soon. He is most easily entered by the mouth.
Taken
.

The rider has a use for Hodd, but at this time it is not a cruel use. It rides him lightly. The reporter does not even realize that he is no longer alone in his skin.

37

AFTER SECURING THE WOBURN HOUSE, LIONEL TIMMINS WENT to Reese Salsetto’s apartment building with keys he had taken off the dead man’s body. He hoped to find photos or other evidence to confirm that Salsetto had been erotically obsessed with his niece. The man was dead. Brenda Woburn would not be charged in such an obviously justified act of self-defense. But Lionel abhorred loose ends even in open-and-shut cases certain never to be brought before a judge.

The limestone-clad exterior of the building featured carved window surrounds, and the interior of the lobby offered marble on every surface except the faux-silver-leafed ceiling. This was not a residence for old money, catering instead to the look-at-me rich.

Ronald Phipps, the night doorman—sixtyish, white-haired with a neat white mustache—was so distinguished in appearance and manner that Lionel was saddened to see him in a tacky uniform better suited to the foppish colonel of a banana republic in a comic operetta. He looked like a once-wealthy banker supplementing his Social Security income after losing his fortune.

Phipps appeared not the least surprised to hear that Reese Salsetto
had shot someone and, in return, had been shot dead. Nor did he seem worried about the reputation of the building, perhaps because Salsetto wasn’t the only or even the most colorful resident at this address. His concern was that proper procedures be followed. He called the non-emergency number for the police to confirm that the ID Lionel presented was legitimate. In spite of the hour, he phoned the general manager of the building to get permission to allow the detective to enter the Salsetto apartment.

Lionel could have asserted his authority and gone at once to the twelfth floor, leaving the doorman to follow procedures in his wake. Six years in prison taught him patience, however, and he was loath to demean the old man.

These days, human dignity was everywhere under assault. Lionel chose not to contribute to that war effort.

When he received permission and went up to Salsetto’s apartment, he found the door unlocked and ajar, as if Reese had left in a hurry.

According to Phipps, Salsetto lived with his “fiancée,” Ms. Brittany Zeller. Although
fiancée
had not been given the slightest ironic inflection, Lionel suspected, because of a quickening of the doorman’s blinking, that the title had just then been conferred on her for propriety’s sake.

Standing on the threshold, he called out to her twice. No one answered.

He entered the apartment, switching on lights as he went. In the living room, a well-dressed blonde sprawled on the floor, on her back, the carpet under her dark with blood.

Cautious about contaminating evidence, Lionel stepped just close enough to the woman to be sure that she was dead. Her wide-open right eye stared fixedly and her left was more than half closed, as if she had winked seductively at Death when suddenly he loomed.

Retreating to the hallway, Lionel phoned headquarters, reported the crime, and triggered the dispatch of the medical examiner’s and the crime lab’s crews. This was going to be a long night.

While waiting for the criminalists, Lionel went to the master bedroom. This seemed the most logical place to begin searching for photos of Davinia Woburn or other evidence that Reese Salsetto had been erotically obsessed with her. Within two minutes, he came across extensive evidence of
other
crimes.

Immersed in what he found, Lionel didn’t hear the techs arrive until one of them hailed him from the bedroom doorway. None of them had been at the Woburn house earlier, so he brought them up to date, explaining how the two crimes were connected.

As the M.E.’s team and the lab crew set to work, Lionel returned to the bedroom. Before he could continue to examine the evidence he had uncovered, his cell phone rang.

The caller was Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives. “I’m at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I need you here quicker than a goose can crap. One of our jakes, Andy Tane, he was at the Woburn house, he followed the family to the hospital and murdered them all.”