the raw emotion of it.
Then he could hear Celine, the Celine of his quasi-clairvoyant imagination: crying out in pain and terror, weeping with the shame of violation, pleading for her life, beseeching God to save her, receiving no mercy from the beast who was her brother, receiving no grace until at last, at last, the final thrust of the knife put an end to her misery.
Shaking uncontrollably, hands covering his ears without effect, John turned from the hateful bed, returned to the hallway, leaned his back against the wall, and slid down to sit on the floor. He was in three places simultaneously: this present hallway, this hallway on the murder night, and another house in a distant city twenty years in the past.
Because his father and mother had been artists and art teachers, he had perpetual access to a memory museum of renowned images. Now, before his mind’s eye rose a painting by Goya, the chilling and despair-filled Saturn Devouring His Children.
John had to sit in silence for a while, letting time past wash out of time present. The horrors of the past and of the present were unredeemable, but he held fast to a hope – wild and unreasoned in its character, but ardent – that the future could be shaped so that it would never need redemption.
Although he would have preferred to switch off the lights in Celine’s room and retreat from the house, he eventually got to his feet and crossed her threshold once more. He did not, however, look again at the dead girl’s bed.
Across her desk spilled glossy magazines published for teenagers and, by way of implausible contrast, a paperback of The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton.
Display shelves held an eclectic collection of things pleasing to Celine. Twenty ceramic mice, the largest no more than two inches tall. Seashells. Glass paperweights. A snow globe containing a quaint cottage.
Bells. Behind the mice, between two plush-toy bunnies in white bonnets and gingham dresses, on a green box in which they evidently had come, lay three miniature silver calla lilies all sprouting from one silver stem. The spathes were exquisitely shaped, but instead of a yellow spike, each enclosed a tiny silver clapper.
The stem, by which the bells could be rung, was dark with dried blood and with tarnish the blood encouraged. If the criminalists had noticed the bells, they would have bagged and taken them.
From a box of Kleenex on the desk, John plucked a tissue. He folded it into a pad and gripped the silver stem, not to preserve evidence – too late for that – but to avoid touching the blood.
On the lid of the green box under the calla lilies, in silver script, were the words Piper’s Gallery.
Shaken, the bells produced the crisp, cold ringing that he had heard three times since entering the house.
Unable to suppress a tremor in his hands, he placed the bells and the Kleenex in the box, tucked the box in a sport-coat pocket.
Back in the day, Alton Turner Blackwood had carried with him three silver bells, each the size of a thimble, clustered at the end of a handle. They were not shaped like flowers and were not as finely made as those on Celine’s shelf of small treasures.
Blackwood had been a psychopathic ritualist with an elaborate post-homicide ceremony that suggested both a strange belief system and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. When everyone in his target family was dead, he returned to the victims in the order the killings occurred and arranged them on their backs. With a drop of epoxy, he glued coins on the cadaver’s eyes: quarters that he’d painted black, always with the eagle facing up. In the mouth, on the tongue, he placed a brown disc that the crime lab identified as dried excrement.
Then the killer folded the corpse’s hands at the groin, around a chicken egg. To be sure the hands would not release the egg, he tied thumb to thumb and little finger to little finger with string.
Days prior to a slaughter, he prepared the eggs by drilling two tiny holes in each to drain the contents. Then he inserted a tightly rolled slip of paper through a hole into the well-dried, hollow shell. If the body was male, the paper carried the hand-printed word servus; if female, serva. They were the masculine and feminine forms of the Latin noun that meant “slave.”
After the cadavers had been accessorized to suit him, Blackwood had stood over each, ringing his triune bells.
Billy Lucas had not rearranged his four victims but had left them lying as they died. He didn’t conduct a ritual using black quarters, dried excrement, or hollow eggs. Evidently, however, he rang the tiny bells.
The delicate silver calla lilies featured no engraving.
On each of Blackwood’s bells had been the word RUIN.
John clearly remembered Billy with the almost wistful smile, standing on the farther side of the glass partition.
You mean – what was my motive?
You haven’t said why.
The why is easy.
Then why?
Ruin.
John switched off the lights in Celine’s room and left the door ajar as he had found it.
In the hallway, he stood listening to the house. No floorboards protested, no hinges creaked. No shadow moved.
He went to Billy’s room.
The case detectives – Tanner and Sharp – had searched Billy’s room, leaving a bit less disorder than a burglar would have caused.
A few drawers in the highboy were half open. Tanner or Sharp had rummaged through the clothes therein, leaving them in disarray.
When they searched between the mattress and the box springs, they had not entirely disarranged the chenille spread.
On the nightstand stood a digital alarm clock. The numbers were not flashing as they had flashed on the kitchen clock.
John searched the desk, the closet, the nightstand, with no expectation of finding anything the other detectives had overlooked.
Previous to his killing spree, Billy Lucas’s interests had been, judging by the evidence, entirely wholesome. Sports magazines. Video games, but not particularly violent ones.
Bookshelves held a couple hundred paperbacks. John read each spine. Science fiction, fantasy, mainstream fiction: The boy’s interests were varied, but he possessed not a single true-crime book.
The computer on the desk was operative. Current department procedure in a case of this kind would have been to make a full backup of every document in the directory and take that, instead of the entire hard drive, for review later. With Billy’s confession and his commitment to the state hospital, no detective would have discovered – might ever discover – what the computer contained.
Before reviewing the contents in alphabetical order, John scanned the directory for intriguing key words. In less than half a minute, he found a document titled CALVINO1. Then CALVINO2.
The first contained photos downloaded from an Internet site devoted to serial killers and mass murderers. Here were Tom and Rachel Calvino, John’s mother and father. Also Marnie and Giselle, his sisters, at the ages of ten and twelve.
The photos accompanied the account of Alton Turner Blackwood’s fourth and final massacre of a family. The document did not contain a picture of the killer; apparently none was ever taken of the drifter during his life, and the postmortem shots in the medical examiner’s file were sequestered under a court order that protected young John’s privacy and that was never revoked.
For the same reason, John’s photo was not included. Besides, the site depicted only victims, and he was the sole survivor.
On the screen, his sisters were so lovely.
Many years had passed since he’d been able to look