Darkness Falls (11 page)

It was William.

Next to him was Emma Jackson, without the kerchief on her head.

Both of them were clutching items to their breasts: a piece of paper welcoming them to the fair and various sweets. Their hands were luminescent with the sticky glow of sugar candy and the black of ink.

“We—we thought—we thought we could—could make it back before supper.” William was talking in a dull monotone. “We didn’t—we didn’t think—think we’d be so—so—so—”

And then William said nothing at all.

Neither did Emma.

They just stared at the burning corpse of Matilda Dixon.

A woman who had done nothing wrong.

John Ames felt a bit of himself die.

eleven

2002

Caitlin had had no idea how, well, vicious some of the old Grimm fairy tales truly were.

She had borrowed a big old hardbound edition of the stories compiled by the Brothers Grimm from the hospital library. It was one of those massive tomes full of old-timey engraved illustrations.

Having been weaned primarily on the Disney animated versions of a lot of fairy tales, Caitlin had been rather shocked to see how lurid, graphic, and unpleasant a lot of these tales were. People chopping off their own feet, death, destruction, removal of firstborn children . . .

She looked up at Michael, who was, miracle of miracles, asleep. His lights had gone out, so to speak, somewhere in the middle of “Cinderella.”

Smiling at him, she said, “And then, when he got to the castle, he was only interested in the television remote.”

Shaking her head, she closed the book with a satisfying thump, put it aside, and went over to wash her hands. The book was old and dusty and left a musty smell on her hands. She actually kind of liked it—it reminded her of when her mother read stories to her as a kid—but it didn’t really fit with the sterile atmosphere of the hospital.

As soon as she finished washing and drying her hands, she looked up from the sink to see her pale, wan reflection in the mirror.

Under other circumstances, she might have thought about how awful she looked, but that was superseded by something rather more awful: Kyle Walsh, now standing behind Caitlin and looking as if he’d been rolling around in gravel.

“Hey, Cat,” he said casually, as if he were bumping into her in the supermarket or something.

“What happened?” she asked, aghast.

“Coming-home party.”

He fell more than sat in one of the guest chairs and just stared at the floor.

Caitlin glanced over at Michael to see that—miraculously—he was still asleep.

Then she looked over at Kyle to see that he was bleeding from a gash in his head.

“You’re bleeding!” she said, hoping it would get some kind of reaction.

Kyle kept staring at the floor.

Sighing, Caitlin went over to one of the carts in the hospital room and wheeled it next to where Kyle was sitting. She also retrieved some gauze from one of the cabinet drawers.

After a moment, she hesitated, realizing that she’d obviously been spending
way
too much time in hospitals lately, if she was just helping herself to first-aid material as if she owned the place.

As she started to apply the gauze, Kyle finally moved, jerking forward in obvious pain.

“I can’t help you if you don’t sit up.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Mostly,” she said, trying to keep a straight face.

He turned and looked up at her doubtfully. For just one second, he almost looked like the ten-year-old boy she had impulsively kissed half a dozen lifetimes ago.

“ ‘Mostly,’ ” he said, “does
not
inspire confidence.”

She smiled wryly. “I’m not trying to inspire confidence, I’m trying to get a piece of gravel out of your scalp.”

As she cleaned out his wound with tweezers and a sterile pad, she asked, “So how did this happen?”

Kyle said nothing in reply. She’d seen more lively statues.

“Okay, give me the last twelve years in twenty-five words or less.”

Still staring at the floor, he said, “Went to a foster home. The Fishers. We moved out west to Vegas. Now I work at one of the casinos.” A pause. “Have I hit twenty-five words yet?”

“Keep going,” she said, grateful that he was talking, finally.

“Are you and Larry—”

He let the question hang.

She decided in a moment of perversity to dodge the issue just to torture him a bit. “Why do you ask?”

“I—I don’t know, I just—ow!”

That last was in response to her finally dislodging one particular piece of gravel from his forehead.

Caitlin triumphantly held the gravel up in the tweezers before Kyle’s eyes. “Got it. If that didn’t work, I was gonna clock you over the head.”

Rubbing the wound, Kyle said, “I think I would’ve preferred that.”

Finally, for the first time since he had arrived, he looked right at her.

To her surprise, she found herself unable to hold the gaze, and so she looked over at Michael.

He was still asleep, despite the noise. Thank heaven for small favors . . .

She shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

“Don’t give him any more tests,” Kyle said suddenly.

Frowning, she said, “What?”

“They stuck me with every needle known to man, woman, or child, they gave me more Rorschachs than I could ever count, and it didn’t do a goddamn thing.”

Caitlin stared at him for several seconds. This was the first truly helpful thing he’d said since he arrived.

“I’m sorry you’re hurt,” she said in a quiet voice.

Kyle snorted. “So am I.”

She raised a hand to his face. Kyle started to move his head away but then stopped. Cupping his cheek in her hand, she stared right into his eyes.

Even in Michael at his absolute worst, she’d never seen as much pain as she saw in Kyle Walsh’s eyes.

Almost whispering now, she said, “I’m glad you came.”

“So am I,” he repeated.

Their eyes locked. Feelings that Caitlin had forgotten she had ever had—hell, had forgotten even existed—started coming to the surface.

Then the moment was shattered by a harsh male voice.

“Kyle Walsh?”

Caitlin looked up to see Officer Matt Henry, along with two other cops. The other two had their guns drawn.

“I’m gonna need you to come with me, Mr. Walsh.”

“Why?” Kyle asked, though it sounded to Caitlin as if he knew the answer.

“For questioning involving the murder of Ray Winchester.”

Caitlin blinked. “Ray? Ray’s dead?”

“I’m afraid so, Ms.—”

“Greene. Caitlin Greene.”

Matt nodded. “Right, you’re going to need to come with us, also.”

Caitlin looked over to Kyle, and her heart fell. Just a minute ago, he had finally started to open up, but now he was back in statue mode as he got up from the chair and followed the cops out of the hospital room.

Captain Thomas Henry loved interrogations.

It was the only part of city crime he truly missed. Most of the time, being a cop in places like Hartford and Nashua was nightmarish, a combination of tedium, stupidity, and paperwork. And he doubted he’d ever be able to handle the sheer carnage involved in a
really
big city like Boston or Providence.

Generally, the small-town atmosphere of Darkness Falls was to his liking. Not very glamorous, but at least the crimes were generally simple and easy to deal with.

The only drawback was the relative lack of interrogations. And the ones he did do were usually pretty straightforward.

Still, he relished the challenge. The old comic books used to say that criminals were a cowardly and superstitious lot, but mostly they were just dumb as posts. However, they did have rights. Often, they didn’t understand what they were even after you explained them four times, but they still had them. So the interrogation became a dance: work your way around Miranda, sidestep the legal land mines, and get yourself a confession just as the music stops.

This one was going to be a special challenge. On the one hand, it was patently obvious that Kyle Walsh had killed Ray Winchester. They were last seen duking it out in the parking lot of Bennigan’s, there was a history—apparently Walsh had stabbed Winchester in the back with a protractor when they were both kids—and Walsh had a history of mental illness. A slam-dunk.

On the other hand, there was no physical evidence and no eyewitnesses to the actual murder. The medical examiner hadn’t found
any
trace evidence on Winchester’s body and wasn’t optimistic about finding any, though the lab work would take a while. They weren’t set up for murders around these parts, so the full test results would take weeks, but usually that was just a formality for the trial. There should have been
something
easy to pick up at the crime scene, but there wasn’t.

So the only way this would truly be the slam-dunk that Henry knew it should be was to get a confession out of Kyle Walsh.

The interrogation room was drab and uninteresting, as all interrogation rooms should be, to Henry’s mind. The centerpiece was a formica table that probably dated back to the Mesozoic Era. An old metal chair with a ripped vinyl cushion sat on one side of the table, with two newer, more comfortable chairs on the other side. Naturally, the perp sat in the crummy chair.

Henry laid out the crime-scene photos on the table right in front of where Walsh would be sitting. He wanted to make sure that every angle of Winchester’s grisly death would be visible.

On the side table, he had put out the rather startling variety of flashlights that Walsh carried either in his bag or on his person, ranging from a huge Maglite, similar to the ones the department had issued to Henry and his people, to a tiny but powerful penlight.

He also placed the six bottles of pills they’d confiscated from Walsh on the table. Then he decided to stick them in his pocket, in order to bring them out at the right moment. Interrogation was as much performance as anything, and it always paid to time things right.

Finally, he had Walsh’s paperwork, which had made for some very entertaining reading.

Henry’s son Matt—a good boy, who had followed in his father’s footsteps—had brought Walsh in through the side entrance and had been careful to avoid the notice of Larry Fleishman. Though he wasn’t a patch on the shysters you found in larger cities, Fleishman could still be a royal pain in the ass if he wanted to be. Henry’s preferred method of dealing with defense attorneys was to avoid them at all costs.

With any luck, Fleishman wouldn’t even know they had Walsh here.

When all was in readiness, Henry had Matt bring Walsh in. The perp had a gash on his head that the Greene woman had apparently given him some first aid for.

Walsh sat down in the “guest chair” and just stared straight ahead. If the crime-scene photos or the display of his flashlight collection had any effect on him, he didn’t show it.

Henry wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

“You want to talk about it?”

Walsh shrugged. “I didn’t do it.”

Nodding, Henry said, “That’s original. Okay, I’ll play along. Do you know who did?”

Walsh didn’t even dignify that with a reply. That was okay. It didn’t really deserve one.

Henry walked over to the other table. “What’s with all the flashlights? You afraid of the dark?”

“Yes.”

The captain whirled around. He hadn’t expected so blunt an answer, or one in the affirmative.

He thought that went a lot toward explaining both the hardware store inventory and the pharmacopeia.

Speaking of which . . .

“Klonopin,” he said, taking one bottle out of his pocket and setting it down on the table in front of Walsh but out of his reach. “Darvaset.” He set that one down. “Shit, this one I can’t even pronounce.” He laid it down, then did the same with the other three.

He regarded the perp. “Doc says half of these are antipsychotics. Now, I don’t know much about medicine, but it occurs to me that if a man is taking antipsychotics, it might be because he has the tendency to become, well, psychotic.”

“Can I have them, please?”

Henry frowned. “You have to take them now?”

“Yeah.”

An opening. “When’s the last time you took them?”

“Yesterday.”

A
big
opening. “Bottles say take once every six hours. You’re telling me you haven’t taken them in twenty-four?” He let that hang for a second, then added, “Speaking of which, the bartender says you had a beer. Not supposed to drink when you’re taking prescription drugs, now, are you?”

Walsh looked away. Henry plopped down in the seat opposite him.

“That’s right, Kyle, the uniform’s not just for parties. I’m a real live cop. And you’re a real live suspect in a real live murder.”

“I told you, I didn’t kill him.”

Henry leaned back. “You know, I’d just
love
to take your word for it, but I keep seeing all this evidence pile up. You were the last one to be seen with the victim, and you were fighting with him at the time. Well, okay, to be fair, you were running away from him, but the point is, violence was involved. He threw your beer at you. In fact, you still reek of it. You and the victim have a history of violence.”

“It was twelve years ago. I didn’t even remember who he was!”

“He remembered you, though. Hard to forget someone who stabs you in the back.”

Then Henry got up and picked up the folder with Walsh’s rather extensive medical file. “And that was just the beginning. Stabbed your mother with scissors the same night you nailed Winchester in the back. Ward of the state mental hospital for
nine years.
Suffered from all kinds of fun things: major dissociative syndrome, night terrors. Should I continue?”

Walsh said nothing.

Henry shrugged and went on.

“Sociopathic tendencies. Attacking guards, attacking nurses, attacking yourself. Self-mutilation—cigarette burns, razor blades. Three suicide attempts.”

“How?”

Blinking at the non sequitur, Henry could only ask, “How what?” He doubted that Walsh had forgotten how he had attempted suicide.

“How did I kill Ray?”