Daughter of Darkness (28 page)

    
Here goes
, he thought, tilting his head back, opening his eyes. The Visine made him jerk, jump. It stung almost as badly as the stuff in the red ball. But after a few moments, the Visine cooled the stinging, and through the blur of his vision he was dimly able to make out his face in the mirror.

    He worked on his eyes for nearly fifteen minutes. It took that long to get his vision back to something resembling normal. In the meantime, cats Tasha and Tess came in and stood on either side of him and rubbed up against his legs. They comforted him, he comforted them.

    When he finished in the bathroom, he grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen and went down to the basement. He checked through the tools the intruder had left behind. A good detective should be able to find some distinguishing marks on the tools, something that would point in the direction of their owner. But the wrench and the screwdriver bore the stamp of True Value hardware. With a chain of stores that big, tracing these tools would be almost impossible. Hundreds if not thousands of these things were sold every day.

    He next retraced the intruder's steps, trying to see if the man had dropped anything. Kitchen. Dining room. Living room. Nothing.

    He took his flashlight and went out onto the porch. He liked this time of morning. The moon and stars, the hushed animal sounds of urban raccoons and possums as they foraged through yards, the soft sweet feel and tang of the fresh air.

    He went back and forth over the front porch. He found nothing. Then he remembered the watch flying off the intruder's wrist. Apparently the watch had flown off the porch and landed in the shrubs planted along the side of the porch.

    He went down the steps and along the side of the house. Just before she'd been killed, his wife had planted some Korean boxwood all the way around the house, it was a low-growing, hedgelike plant that kept its beauty for many long months a year.

    He didn't have any luck at first.

    The watch hadn't landed on top of the boxwood, nor had it fallen down and landed on the ground. Which meant that it was probably entangled in the hedge itself.

    He took his flashlight and angled its beam through every inch of hedge from porch steps to where the house proper began. No way the watch could have gotten lost any farther back.

    The search took ten minutes. He found nothing.

    Crystal came out the front door and jumped up on the rail in back of the hedge. Tess was the most curious of the cats, but Crystal was the one most likely to stray out on the porch. They were all supposed to stay inside. They'd been spayed and declawed.

    But here stood Crystal, looking down at her nice but dumb master. She wanted him, as always, to amuse her in some way.

    "Go back inside," he said to her. "You know you're not supposed to be out here."

    She just looked at him, a black and white and brown calico who could appear sweet and imperious at the same time, which wasn't easy to do.

    Then Crystal made a decision. If
he
wasn't going to put on a show for her,
she'd
put on a show for him.

    Crystal jumped on top of the hedge, instantly realizing that the surface of the hedge wasn't what it appeared to be. It was rough and prickly and she didn't like it.

    She sprang from the hedge into Coffey's arms. She'd just landed when he heard the faint
thunk
of something hitting the ground.

    He shone his light down on the black soil beneath the boxwood. There lay the intruder's watch.

    He reached down, snatched it up, and then took himself. Crystal, and the watch back inside.

    After giving Crystal a special treat of tuna fish, he sat down at the kitchen table and began going over the watch carefully.

    The first thing he noticed was the strange symbol on the underside, a circle with a stylized S drawn inside.

    And beneath that, in tiny script: SIGMA.

    

    

    She's a little girl, and she's sick. The flu. The bad stomach has passed, at least. Now all that remains are the headache and the fever. The fever is especially bad for her. Even though she kicks the covers on to the floor, even though (against Mommy's wishes), she sneaks the bedroom window open, she is broiling hot.

    And the nightmares. When she's sick like this, the nightmares are especially bad. Running down the long, dark tunnel. A hideous thing only partially human lumbering close behind her. Wanting her. She screams, but somehow she knows that the scream is only in her dream. Mommy can't actually hear the scream and neither can Daddy. She is trapped inside her nightmares, and nobody can get her out. Not ever.

    And then she is awake. And she is not a little girl. And she is in a room not her own, a shadowy room.

    She is Jenny. And Jenny is twenty-five. And Jenny should be home in her own bed this time of night. She has never been the type to sleep around and that's what this feels like. There's something
wrong
about being here.

    She's Jenny Stafford. Age twenty-five. And she does not want to be here.

    A soft mist-kissed breeze comes through the open window. It makes her feel better. Her anxiety flows away from her for a time…

    Her bladder is the real problem right now. She really needs to go. She looks around. Where is the bathroom? Then she sees it. The door open just a bit. No lights on. Presumably nobody in there.

    She shivers, decides that the breeze isn't so nice after all.

    She's getting cold. She starts to bring her left hand up to rub her chilly nose. The hand is stained with something dark and sticky. She brings up her other hand. Same thing, dark and sticky.

    She is not an imbecile. She knows immediately what she's looking at. She feels overwhelmed by so many forces. Not knowing where she is or how she got here. Needing so badly to pee. And now, her hands streaked with what must be blood.

    She stands up. Legs shaky. Body covered with rough goose bumps. She looks down at herself. Her thighs, her stomach, her breasts are also blood-splashed. What in God's name is going on here?

    And then she remembers the other night. The motel room. The dead man. And her not being able to remember any of it. And then the stranger, Coffey, yes, that's his name. Can she really trust him? She has doubts.

    It's now or never. Has to pee. Walks carefully across the hardwood floor, grateful for the occasional throw rug on the wood. The bottoms of her feet feel frozen.

    When she reaches the bathroom door, she pauses. Force of habit. Good little Catholic girls always pause before bathroom doors. To make sure it's not being used. Someone might be sitting in there right now. In the dark. Some people probably
prefer
the dark.

    She knocks. It's almost funny, knocking in this situation. But she knocks two times and then waits for an answer. When she doesn't get one, she pushes the door open, and that's when she sees the man lying face up on the bathroom floor.

    There is a lot of blood in the crotch area. It has leaked on to the floor and has created a small river between his legs. The butcher knife, presumably the same one that claimed the man's masculinity, stands straight up in the man's throat. The eyes are difficult to look at. They are sorrowful eyes, probably a snapshot of the man's whole life. Difficult to imagine that a man would be
happy
that God or fate had dealt him such a hand.

    She doesn't scream, run, get sick, or faint. She is still thinking back to the other night, to the dead man on the bed in the motel, dead also of a knife wound.

    What other conclusion can there be? She very quietly goes back to bed and lies down and pulls the covers over her.

    Two dead men. Her waking up in close proximity to them. Unable to remember much of anything on either occasion.

    The electroshock treatments. The hint from the good gray doctors that Jenny, in certain circumstances, could possibly be dangerous to herself and others, Mrs. Stafford (with Jenny sitting right there next to her mother), and we certainly don't want that to happen, do we? The first thing we need to work on is the depression. I know you've heard a lot of negative things about electroshock, but believe me, it's going to make you feel very good about yourself for the first time in a long, long time, Jenny.

    Could possibly be a danger to herself.

    Or others.

    In certain circumstances.

    She thinks about calling Coffey. But can she really trust him? Wasn't it quite a coincidence that he just happened to be appear in that shelter the other night? He's so quiet, mysterious…

    And then a name-and a phone number-come to her as she lies there in the darkness. But, no, that's ridiculous. Why would she call him? But even as she thinks this, about him being her enemy, she has a sense that he'd be able to calm her down, walk her through her last week, help her come to terms with what's going on with her spiritually.

    She wonders what time it is and then realizes that she doesn't
care
what time it is. She is too far gone to care. So scared. So disoriented. Is she muttering, or are her teeth merely chattering? She isn't sure. And then suddenly she realizes she hasn't peed. Didn't want to step over the body to sit down. Just too ghoulish. Still, her bladder can't hold out much longer.

    She turns and stares at the phone on the nightstand. Even more pressing than her bladder is who she'll call.

    Her mother is probably waiting by the phone, hoping to hear from her. The problem there is she'll be full of advice and lawyers and fear and anger and the whole thing will be a mess. Jenny needs time to sort things out. Figure out why she's killed two men.
If
she's killed two men. But if
she
hasn't, who has? And why blame it on her?

    The more she thinks, the more she realizes that there really is only one person she can turn to for such enormous problems as hers.

    A noise. Hushed voices in the hallway. Police sneaking up?

    Beneath the covers, she tenses. What could she possibly say if they came in here? If they found the body (and why
wouldn't
they find the body), how could she possibly make them believe that she hadn't had anything to do with it?

    Or hadn't she?

    That was the most difficult problem of all to confront. Her anger toward men. Maybe, drunk, still slightly unhinged from her time in the psychiatric hospital, maybe she'd found a butcher knife and-

    But it was hard to imagine herself, even in a frenzy, cutting off his-

    It wasn't the cops. In the hallway. It was a man kissing his wife good-bye and whispering a few things to her. A lot of jobs started earlier these days, designed to let workers get off earlier. Then she heard the man's footsteps, retreating down the hall. Then there was car engine, firing up in the parking lot below.

    And then in the silence, she started staring at the phone again. The headache was back. And with such force that she had to stab her fingers deep into her eyeballs to stop the pain.

    And then a name filled her mind. Her entire consciousness enshrined the name.

    My God, what a crazy, crazy thought, calling him. My God, he was the
last
person she would call, right?

    The very last…

    She wondered what he'd say, being awakened at this hour, hearing her voice on the other end of the phone.

    He'd been taken with her, no doubt about that. She believed that he sincerely, genuinely
liked
her for a time. And took a real interest in her. He even helped her in a lot of ways, showed her the things she did and felt that she should be proud of. Self-esteem. She hated that particular buzzword. It was so overused. But that, in effect, was what he'd given her-or, more importantly, shown her how to give herself.

    Now it wasn't self-esteem she needed. Now it was sanity. Now it was somebody who could at least see the possibility that she hadn't committed these murders… even though most people would blame her absolutely.

    She reached out to the phone. She picked up the receiver. She dialed the number. She knew it by heart.

    A sleepy male voice answered. "Yes?"

    She could picture him. He really was a striking man.

    "It's Jenny Stafford," she said. "I need some help. Desperately."

    She heard covers rustle. His voice being cleared. She could tell he was sitting up now.

    "Where are you?" Quinlan said. "I'll come and get you personally and bring you back to the hospital."

    "I'd really appreciate it," she said. "I really would."

    

    

    When the phone rang, Coffey sat up straight, like a comic version of Dracula in his coffin.

    He was tired, exhausted really, so little sleep and so much stress, that he had to put himself in context before he could do anything.

    Daylight. His bedroom. Bed. All three cats sprawled on the bed. Phone ringing. Phone on nightstand.

    He reached over and picked up.

    "Sigma Corporation," a male voice said, then continued, "it's your hard-working pal at the police department. Took me a while, but I found out who the lease company issued the van to."

    "Sigma Corporation," Coffey said. He thought of the symbol on the underside of the watch the intruder had been wearing. The S shape inside the circle. "Did you get an address?"

    "Not far from the Merchandise Mart." He then gave Coffey the address. Coffey kept a pad and pencil on the nightstand.

    "I really appreciate this."

    "No big deal. Just took a little persistence, is all."