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 shed 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.
Thunder came and went, thunder with lightning and without. A few cars and trucks seemed to float past as if awash in a flood.
The state hospital was an hour’s drive from the city, where John lived and where he had an appointment to keep before he went home. He powered the driver’s seat forward, switched on the windshield wipers, released the hand brake, and put the Ford in gear.
He didn’t want to think what he was thinking, but the thought was a sentinel voice that would not be silenced. His wife and his children were in grave danger from someone, something.
His family and two others before it were at risk, and he did not know if he could save any of them.
Using two spoons, Marion Dunnaway scooped dough from the steel mixing bowl, deftly shaped it into a ball, and deposited it on the baking sheet, where eight others were arranged in rows.
“If I’d ever had children and now had grandchildren, I’d never let them near the Internet unless I was sitting beside them.”
She kept a tidy kitchen. Yellow-and-white curtains framed a view of the storm and seemed to bring order even to the chaotic weather.
“There’s too much sick stuff too easily accessed. If they see it when they’re young, the seed of an obsession might be planted.”
She scooped up more dough, spoon clicked against spoon, and a tenth cookie-to-be appeared almost magically on the Teflon sheet.
Marion had retired from the army after serving thirty-six years as a surgical nurse. Short, compact, sturdy, she radiated competence. Her strong hands attended to every task with brisk efficiency.
“Say a boy is just twelve when he comes across such trash. The mind of a twelve-year-old is highly fertile soil, Detective Calvino.”
“Highly,” John agreed from his chair at the dinette table.
“Any seed planted in it is likely to thrive, which is why you have to guard against an ill wind that might blow in a weed pip.”
Under a helmet of thick white hair, Marion’s face was that of a fifty-year-old, though she was sixty-eight. Her smile was sweet, and John suspected her laugh would be hearty, though he doubted that he would ever hear it.
Warming his hands around his coffee mug, he said, “You think that’s what happened to Billy – some weed pip from the Internet?”
Having pressed an eleventh ball of dough to the baking sheet, she said nothing as she shaped the final cookie in the batch.
Then she raised her face to the window, staring toward the house next door. John assumed she was seeing beyond that place, imagining the house two doors away – the Lucas residence, the house of death.
“Damned if I know. They were a solid family. Good people. Billy was always polite. The nicest boy. So very considerate of his mother after the accident that put her in the wheelchair.”
She opened the oven. With a quilted mitt, she took out a tray of finished cookies and put it on the sinkside cutting board to cool.
A flood of hot air poured the aromas of chocolate and coconut and pecans through the kitchen. Curiously, instead of making John’s mouth water, the smell briefly nauseated him.
Marion said, “I served in field hospitals, battle zones. Frontline emergency surgeries. Saw a lot of violence, too much death.”
She slid the tray of neatly arranged dough balls into the oven, closed the door, and took off the quilted mitt.
“I got so I could tell at first sight which ones would survive their wounds, which wouldn’t. I could see death in their faces.”
From a drawer near the refrigerator, she extracted a key and brought it to the table.
“I never saw death in Billy. Not a glimpse of it. The Internet theory is just twiddle-twaddle, Detective Calvino. Just the jabber of an old woman who’s afraid to admit some evil can’t be explained.”
She gave him the key, which dangled from a beaded chain with a plastic cat charm. The cat was a grinning golden tabby.
Billy’s parents loved cats. They’d had two spayed British spotted shorthairs,