What the Night Knows: A Novel Read online

  Behind John, the boy called out, “You should have brought me something. You should have made an offering.”

  The detective closed the door and looked down at his shoes in the fluorescent glare of the corridor. Not one drop of foulness marred their shine.

  As the door to the guard’s vestibule opened, John walked toward it, toward Coleman Hanes, whose size and presence gave him the almost mythological aura of one who battled giants and dragons.

  3

  ON THE SECOND FLOOR, ONE DOWN FROM BILLY LUCAS, THE hospital-staff lounge featured an array of vending machines, a bulletin board, blue molded-plastic chairs, and Formica tables the color of flesh.

  John Calvino and Coleman Hanes sat at one of the tables and drank coffee from paper cups. In the detective’s coffee floated a blind white eye, a reflection of a can light overhead.

  “The stench and the darkness of the urine are related to his regimen of medications,” Hanes explained. “But he’s never done anything like that before.”

  “Maybe you better hope it’s not his new preferred form of self-expression.”

  “We don’t take chances with bodily fluids since HIV. If he does that again, we’ll restrain and catheterize him for a few days and let him decide whether he’d rather have a little freedom of movement.”

  “Won’t that bring lawyers down on you?”

  “Sure. But once he’s pissed on them, they won’t see it as a civil right anymore.”

  John glimpsed something on the orderly’s right palm that he had not noticed previously: a red, blue, and black tattoo, the eagle-globe-and-anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps.

  “You serve over there?”

  “Two tours.”

  “Hard duty.”

  Hanes shrugged. “That whole country’s a mental hospital, just a lot bigger than this place.”

  “In your view, does Billy Lucas belong in a mental hospital?”

  The orderly’s smile was as thin as a filleting knife. “You think he should be in an orphanage?”

  “I’m just trying to understand him. He’s too young for adult prison, too dangerous for any youth correctional facility. So maybe he’s here because there was nowhere else to put him. Do you think he’s insane … ?”

  Hanes finished his coffee. He crushed the paper cup in his fist. “If he’s not insane, what is he?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “I thought you had the answer. I thought I heard an implied or at the end of the question.”

  “Nothing implied,” John assured him.

  “If he’s not insane, his actions are. If he’s something other than insane, it’s a distinction without a difference.” He tossed the crumpled cup at a wastebasket, and scored. “I thought the case was closed. What did they send you here for?”

  John didn’t intend to reveal that he had never been assigned to the case. “Was the boy given my name before he met me?”

  Hanes shook his head slowly, and John thought of a tank turret coming to bear on a target. “No. I told him he had a visitor he was required to see. I once had a sister, John. She was raped, murdered. I don’t give Billy’s kind any more than I have to.”

  “Your sister—how long ago?”

  “Twenty-two years. But it’s like yesterday.”

  “It always is,” John said.

  The orderly fished his wallet from a hip pocket and flipped directly to the cellophane sleeve in which he kept a photo of his lost sister. “Angela Denise.”

  “She was lovely. How old is she there?”

  “Seventeen. Same age as when she was killed.”

  “Did they convict someone?”

  “He’s in one of the new prisons. Private cell. Has his own TV. They can get their own TV these days. And conjugal visits. Who knows what else they get.”

  Hanes put away his wallet, but he would never be able to put away the memory of his sister. Now that John Calvino knew about the sister, he read Hanes’s demeanor as less phlegmatic than melancholy.

  “I told Billy I was Detective Calvino. I never mentioned my first name. But the kid called me Johnny. Made a point of it.”

  “Karen Eisler at the reception desk—she saw your ID. But she couldn’t have told Lucas. There’s no phone in his room.”

  “Is there any other explanation?”

  “Maybe I lied to you.”

  “That’s one possibility I won’t waste time considering.” John hesitated. Then: “Coleman, I’m not sure how to ask this.”

  Hanes waited, as still as sculpture. He never fidgeted. He never made a sweeping gesture when a raised eyebrow would do as well.

  John said, “I know he was transferred here only four days ago. But is there anything you’ve noticed he does that’s … strange?”

  “Besides trying to pee on you?”

  “Not that it happens to me all the time, but that isn’t what I mean by strange. I expect him to be aggressive one way or another. What I’m looking for is … anything quirky.”

  Hanes considered, then said, “Sometimes he talks to himself.”

  “Most of us do, a little.”

  “Not in the third person.”

  John leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me.”

  “Well, I guess it’s usually a question. He’ll say, ‘Isn’t it a nice day, Billy?’ Or ‘This is so warm and cozy, Billy. Isn’t it warm and cozy?’ The thing he most often asks is if he’s having fun.”

  “Fun? What does he say, exactly?”

  “ ‘Isn’t this fun, Billy? Are you having fun, Billy? Could this be any more fun, Billy?’ ”

  John’s coffee had gone cold. He pushed the cup aside. “Does he ever answer his own questions aloud?”

  Coleman Hanes thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He doesn’t take two sides of a conversation?”

  “No. Mostly just asks himself questions. Rhetorical questions. They don’t really need an answer. It doesn’t sound all that strange, I guess, until you’ve heard him do it.”

  John found himself turning his wedding band around and around on his finger. Finally he said, “He told me that he likes books.”

  “He’s allowed paperbacks. We have a little hospital library.”

  “What kind of thing does he read?”

  “I haven’t paid attention.”

  “True-crime stories? True-murder?”

  Hanes shook his head. “We don’t have any of those. Not a good idea. Patients like Billy find books like that … too exciting.”

  “Has he asked for true-crime books?”

  “He’s never asked me. Maybe someone else.”

  From a compartment in his ID wallet, John extracted a business card and slid it across the table. “Office number’s on the front. I wrote my home and cell numbers on the back. Call me if anything happens.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything unusual. Anything that makes you think of me. Hell, I don’t know.”

  Tucking the card in his shirt pocket, Hanes said, “How long you been married?”

  “It’ll be fifteen years this December. Why?”

  “The whole time we’ve been sitting here, you’ve been turning the ring on your finger, like reassuring yourself it’s there. Like you wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

  “Not the whole time,” John said, because he had only a moment earlier become aware of playing with the wedding band.

  “Pretty much the whole time,” the orderly insisted.

  “Maybe you should be the detective.”

  As they rose to their feet, John felt as if he wore an iron yoke. Coleman had a burden, too. John flattered himself to think he carried his weight with a grace that matched that of the orderly.

  4

  THE ENGINE OBEYED THE KEY AND TURNED OVER SMOOTHLY, but then a hard thump shuddered the Ford. Startled, John Calvino glanced at the rearview mirror to see what had collided with the back bumper. No vehicle occupied the driveway behind him.

  Still unde
r the hospital portico, leaving the engine idling, he got out and went to the back of the car. In the cold air, clouds of white exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, but he could see clearly that everything was as it should be.

  He stepped to the passenger side, which likewise revealed no damage, and got down on one knee to peer beneath the car. Nothing sagged from the undercarriage, nothing leaked.

  The knock had been too loud and too forceful to have been of no importance.

  He raised the hood, but the engine compartment revealed no obvious problem.

  Perhaps his wife, Nicolette, had stowed something in the trunk, and it had fallen over. He leaned in through the open driver’s door, switched off the engine, and plucked the keys from the ignition. When he unlocked the trunk, he found it empty.

  Behind the wheel, he started the engine again. The thump and shudder were not repeated. All seemed well.

  He drove away, under the dripping limbs of the purple beeches, off the grounds of the state hospital, and more than a mile along the county road before he found a section of the shoulder wide enough to allow him to park well clear of the pavement. He left the engine running but switched off the windshield wipers.

  The car seat had power controls. He put it back as far as it would go from the steering wheel.

  He had stopped in a rural area, flat fields to the left of the highway, a rising meadow to the right. On the slope were a few oak trees, almost black against the tall pale grass. Nearer, between the shoulder of the road and the meadow, stood a ramshackle split-rail fence, waiting for wood rot and weather to bring it down.

  A skirling wind shattered rain against the car windows on every side. Beyond the streaming glass, the country scene melted into the amorphous shapes of a dreamscape.

  As a detective, John was a cabinetmaker. He started with a theory just as a cabinetmaker started with scale drawings. He built his case with facts as real as wood and nails.

  A police investigation, like crafting fine cabinetry, required dimensional imagination and much thought. After interviews, John’s habit was to find a quiet place where he could be alone to think about what he’d learned while it remained fresh in his mind, and to determine if any new clues dovetailed with old ones.

  His laptop computer rested on the passenger seat. He opened it on the console.

  Days ago, he had downloaded and saved the 911 call that Billy had placed on that bloody night. John replayed it now:

  “You better come. They’re all dead.”

  “Who is dead, sir?”

  “My mother, father, grandmother. My sister.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Billy Lucas. I’m fourteen.”

  “What’s your address there?”

  “You know it already. It came up on your screen when I called.”

  “Have you checked them for signs of life?”

  “Yes, I checked them very closely for signs of life.”

  “Have you had any first-aid training?”

  “Trust me, they’re dead. I killed them. I killed them hard.”

  “You killed them? Son, if this is a prank—”

  “This isn’t a prank. The prank is over. I pranked them all. I pranked them good. Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing. Good-bye now. I’ll be waiting for you on the front porch.”

  Along the county road came two vehicles behind headlights. Seen through the smeared and misted windows, through the deluge, they had little detail and resembled bathyscaphes motoring through an oceanic trench.

  As John watched the traffic pass, the puddled blacktop blazing in their beams, bright reflections coruscating along his streaming windows, the afternoon was further distorted and made strange. He was plagued by confusion, disconcerted to find himself—a man of reason—wandering in a fog of superstition.

  He felt adrift in space and time, memory as valid as the moment.

  Twenty years earlier and half a continent from here, four people had been murdered in their home. The Valdane family.

  They had lived less than a third of a mile from the house in which John Calvino was raised. He knew them all. He went to school with Darcy Valdane and nursed a secret crush on her. He’d been fourteen at the time.

  Elizabeth Valdane, the mother, was stabbed with a butcher knife. Like Sandra Lucas, Billy’s mother, Elizabeth had been found dead in her kitchen. Both women were wheelchair-bound.

  Elizabeth’s husband, Anthony Valdane, was brutally bludgeoned with a hammer. The killer left the claw end of the implement embedded in the victim’s shattered skull—as Billy, too, had left the hammer in his father’s head.

  Anthony had been attacked while sitting at the workbench in his garage; Robert Lucas had been clubbed to death in his study. As the hammer arced down, Anthony was building a birdhouse; Robert was writing a check to the electric company. Birds went homeless, bills went unpaid.

  Victoria, Elizabeth Valdane’s sister, a widow who lived with them, had been punched in the face and strangled with a red silk scarf. Ann Lucas, Billy’s grandmother, a recent widow, was punched and subsequently strangled with such ferocity that the scarf—red this time, too—cut deep into her throat. The women’s relationships to their families were not identical, but eerily similar.

  Fifteen-year-old Darcy Valdane endured rape before being stabbed to death with the same butcher knife used on her mother. Twenty years later, Celine Lucas, sixteen, was raped—and then butchered with the same blade used on her mother.

  Darcy had suffered nine knife wounds. Celine, too, was stabbed nine times.

  Then I stabbed her precisely nine times.…

  Why did you say “precisely”?

  Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine.

  In both cases, the order of the murders was the same: mother, father, widowed aunt/grandmother, and finally the daughter.

  John Calvino’s laptop directory contained a document titled “Then-Now,” which he had composed over the past few days, listing the similarities between the Valdane-family and the Lucas-family murders. He didn’t need to bring it to the screen, for he had committed it to memory.

  A flatbed truck, transporting a large and arcane piece of farm machinery, roared past, casting up a spray of dirty water. In the murky light, the machine looked insectile and prehistoric, furthering the quality of unreality that characterized this drowned afternoon.

  Cocooned in his car, as wind ceaselessly spun filaments of rain around it, John considered the faces of two murderers that phased like moons through his mind’s eye.

  The Lucas family had been destroyed by one of their own, by handsome blue-eyed Billy, honor student and choirboy, his features smooth and innocent.

  The Valdanes, who had no son, were murdered by an intruder whose looks were less appealing than those of Billy Lucas.

  That long-ago killer had committed additional atrocities against three other families in the months that followed the Valdane murders. During the last of those crimes, he’d been shot to death.

  The journal that he left behind, hundreds of handwritten pages, suggested that he had killed often prior to the Valdanes, generally one victim at a time. He didn’t name them or say where those murders were committed. He didn’t care to brag—until he started to kill entire families and felt that his work was then worthy of admiration. Aside from the story of his detestable origins, the journal consisted mostly of a demented philosophical ramble about death with a lowercase d and about what it was like to be Death with an uppercase D. He believed he had become “an immortal aspect” of the grim reaper.

  His true name was Alton Turner Blackwood. He had lived under the false name Asmodeus. Itinerant, he had traveled ceaselessly in a series of stolen vehicles or hobo-style in boxcars, or sometimes as a ticketed passenger on buses. A vagrant, he slept in whatever vehicle he currently possessed, in abandoned buildings, in homeless shelters, in culverts and under bridges, in the backseats of twisted wrecks in automobile junkyards, in any she
d left unlocked, once in an open grave covered by a canopy raised for a morning burial service, and secretly in church basements.

  He stood six feet five, scarecrow-thin but strong. His hands were immense, the spatulate fingers as suctorial as the toe discs of a web-foot toad. Large bony wrists like robot joints, orangutan-long arms. His shoulder blades were thick and malformed, so that bat wings appeared to be furled under his shirt.

  After each of the first three families had been savaged, Alton Blackwood had rung 911, not from the site of the murders, but from a public phone. His vanity required that the bodies be found while they were fresh, before the flamboyant process of decomposition upstaged his handiwork.

  Blackwood was long dead, the four cases were closed, and the crimes occurred in a small city with inadequate protocols for the archiving of 911 calls. Of the three messages the killer had left, only one remained, regarding the second family, the Sollenburgs.

  The previous day, John had solicited a copy of the recording, ostensibly as part of the Lucas investigation, and had received it by email as an MP3 file. He had loaded it into his laptop. Now he played it again.

  When Blackwood spoke in an ordinary volume, his voice was a rat-tail file rasping against a bar of brass, but in the 911 calls, he spoke sotto voce, evidently to foil identification. His whisper sounded like an utterance by the progeny of snake and rat.

  “I killed the Sollenburg family. Go to 866 Brandywine Lane.”

  “Speak up please. Say again.”

  “I’m the same artist who did the Valdane family.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not hearing you clearly.”

  “You can’t keep me on the line long enough to find me.”

  “Sir, if you could speak up—”

  “Go see what I’ve done. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  In his 911 call, Billy Lucas had said, Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing.

  To any police detective, the similarities between these two crimes, committed twenty years apart, would suggest that Billy Lucas read about Alton Turner Blackwood’s murder spree and imitated it as an homage to the killer.

  But Billy had not mentioned Blackwood. Billy said not one word about his inspiration. Of motive, he said only Ruin.