Malice (18 page)

The man put a hand on his shoulder to push him back down. But in the time it took Frank to persuade Lysander to lay down, he had managed to see Samantha huddled by the stairwell, a blanket draped over her shoulders. In her hands was a steaming cup. Over by the driveway a group of girls were talking to a blond-haired man who looked a lot like Deputy Morgan—except this Alex Morgan was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, a casual look that didn’t seem to fit. The girls were crying. One of them, wearing a tattered white dress, had buried her face in her hands.

Even in his semi-delirious state, Lysander could tell that the police and paramedics had arrived only a short time ago.

Frank, the paramedic, shone a light into Lysander’s eyes, swinging the beam left to right.

“Focus on the light,” he ordered.

Lysander did his best and then grew distracted when he heard a car pull up. A door opened and a pair of women’s heels clicked up the driveway behind him. He turned his head—much to Frank’s annoyance—and saw a silver-haired woman in a white lab coat. Dorothy! She was pulling on latex gloves and heading for the house. Lysander thought for a moment: Who called the coroner? Did it have something to do with Summer and her ridiculous accusation of rape? Was she about to start looking for semen samples from the bed they were in? If that were the case, he reasoned, they would not have left him lying here on the ground soaking it up with Dr. Goodlights. He would have been crammed into the backseat of one of those brown and white jobs, facing a steel grill.

He blinked. The fog was beginning to lift. And with it, a realization. Every muscle in his body drew tight.

Derek!

He could see his friend, peering into the point of that knife, his terror, raw and sickening. That clown with its twisted face…no, but it wasn’t a clown at all.

It was Millingham’s shepherd.

“Where’s Derek?” The hoarseness of his voice surprised him.

No answer.

He sat bolt upright.

Samantha hadn’t moved. She sat staring sightlessly into her cup. The wisps of steam were gone. The group of girls were gone too. When he went to get up and go to Samantha, to find out about Derek, a feeling of terrible dread growing in him all the while, the light from the house was suddenly eclipsed. A form bent down and the light curved around it, illuminating a face. It was Alex Morgan.

He could see Alex glancing at his left eye, and Lysander’s hand went involuntarily to where a left eyebrow had once been. In its place now were a few scraggly hairs.

“Could have been a lot worse,” Alex said matter-of-factly. “Boy comes at you with a torch like that, you’re lucky to still
have
eyes.”

Lysander looked down, rubbing the nub.

“Oh, and as for those rape charges.” There was a stinging note in Alex’s voice that Lysander didn’t like. “She’s dropped ‘em. Something that girl saw or heard tonight scared the living shit out of her. Wouldn’t say what it was either.”

The subtle implication that Lysander had threatened Summer into silence hung between them. Right now, though, that was the least of his concerns. She could take that little rape charge of hers and shove it up whichever hole fit best.

Alex brought out a note pad and fired several questions at Lysander. For a moment, Lysander contemplated remaining silent.
Let the grown-ups figure it out on their own
, he thought stubbornly.

But he knew that wouldn’t do anyone any good. He took a deep breath and told Alex everything that had happened that night, from messing around with Summer, and the way she had threatened him as he left the room, to his fight with Chad…and to Derek, battling the man with the painted face…

He glanced past the deputy and over at Samantha.

The look on her face gave Lysander gooseflesh. She knew about the reverend, just as well as he did. He could see it in her face. She looked stunned, almost hypnotized. He suspected she hadn’t spoken a word to anyone.

Alex collected himself, scanning his notes. “You said that the room you saw in your…”

He looked visibly uncomfortable. “… your vision…was dark.”

Lysander nodded, hating the way he was being made to feel right now.

“Then how can you be so certain it was Reverend Small that you saw?”

“There was
some
light,” Lysander said. “I could see his face.”

Alex paused to consider this. “Spoke to a number of folks down in Hayward the other day,” he said.

Lysander had been probing what remained of his left eyebrow and his hand froze in mid-course.

“Had some interesting conversations with a Detective Danforth and a Dr. Johnson. The good doctor says she knows you. Knows you quite well, actually. Your mother, she was in a real bad way a while ago, wasn’t she?”

“What does this—” There was a sickening certainty growing in his belly that he knew where this was headed.

“You see, here’s my problem. I want to believe what you’re telling me, about the visions and seeing the guy who did it and all. Strange as it seems, some of it makes more sense than it should. But your track record isn’t helping me. Not to mention the fact that Reverend Small is easily the most respected man in all of Millingham.”

“Well I can’t help it if you don’t believe me. Maybe after he’s killed half the town you’ll figure it out.” Lysander could feel his pulse thumping wildly in his neck. “I gotta talk to Sam,” he said, scrambling to get up.

Alex’s eyes shifted protectively over to Samantha, who remained motionless. “Not now. Go home, Lysander. Your parents are—”

Lysander shouted past Alex to Samantha. She didn’t even flinch. Specks of dried blood dotted her face. Alex reached out and grasped him by the shoulders. “Come now, don’t make things worse.”

The thought of knocking his hands away occurred to Lysander, of punching Alex in the face as Derek had before. He might have swung too, were it not for a hand that suddenly landed on his shoulder. He turned around. It was his father, Glenn.

An hour later Alex and Sheriff Crow were heading toward Reverend Small’s house. Their intention was to question the man so that, as the sheriff had so eloquently put it sliding into his cruiser, “We can move on to finding the real killer.”

Samantha had barely said a word to either of them. Witnesses had seen her running from the house screaming, blood splashed across her face, some of it hers, most of it Derek’s. The paramedics told them she was in shock and gave the sheriff a bottle of little yellow tablets they said would “take the edge off.” She had ridden home with her father, and he had told Alex afterward about something she had said to him along the way.

She had asked him if Derek was all right. When he didn’t answer, she grew morose. Then she said: “You’ll know him by his silver pinky ring, Daddy. It has a picture that looks like an eye.” He had tried to question her on this, but she lapsed into silence again and wouldn’t say another word. He assumed the tablets had begun their numbing work.

Alex had been the first to come upon Derek, sitting upright in the back room, the door smashed in and somehow still remarkably on its hinges. When he entered, jars and broken glass had crunched under his feet. The room smelled of stale beer and of death.

Beside the door handle was the crystal clear impression of a footprint. One they matched to the boots on Derek’s feet.

Thick threads of blood were streaking down both sides of Derek’s face, flowing from the empty sockets where his eyes had once been. His body was slumped forward but still sitting upright, and at first Alex wasn’t sure how he hadn’t fallen over. Until he pushed his way in a little farther and saw that one of Derek’s hands was nailed to the wall, his shirt sleeve matted with blood, his wrists slit open. The index finger of his crucified hand pointed crookedly toward the ceiling. And when Alex looked up, there, in blood, was the eye he had seen on the bathroom mirror, the same one on Peter Hume’s chest. Alex had needed to open the door to finally see it properly, but he knew just the same what it was.

He hadn’t mentioned the bathroom mirror incident from earlier that evening. Alex had understood, even from the man’s body language, his whole attitude toward the case was changing. Before this evening, even talking to Reverend Small about his involvement would have been unthinkable. Whoever had committed those unspeakable acts on Peter Hume and now Derek had also been the same person responsible for the death of Diane Crow and God only knew who else. Alex could see the anger building in the sheriff’s gaze: the coals of a long dormant fire stirred up and glowing bright red.

Moments later they stood before Reverend Small’s front door. Sheriff Crow rang the doorbell once. After the second time a light flickered on in the hall and then another one outside.

The man who finally opened the door looked more like someone out of a retirement home catalogue than a serial killer, and Alex had to stifle the urge to laugh out loud. He had seen the reverend many times before. Not at church, but around town as the man went about his business. In spite of the old coot’s age, Reverend Small always had a youthful and jovial air about him. But the man before them now was old and uncharacteristically disheveled in a green bathrobe, his white hair skewed slightly to one side.

Can you fake bedhead? Alex wondered. The only difference here was, this bedhead was lathered in the kind of cheap aftershave old men seem to love.

Sheriff Crow removed his hat and apologized for the intrusion.

“Not at all, Steven.” The reverend’s smile greeted them both warmly. He waved them inside.

Alex passed over the threshold and two thoughts struck him at once, the first was somewhat comical:

Good job, Alex! You just woke up a poor old man in the middle of the night
.

The second more unsettling:

No one gets out alive
.

All three of them went to the kitchen together.

The house was spotless. On a table by the entrance porcelain figurines of eighteenth-century noblewomen curtsied for them.

Reverend Small put a pot of coffee on. Alex caught the sheriff scanning the reverend’s fingers. On his ring finger, not his pinky was a plain gold band. It winked at Alex as the reverend pulled three mugs from the cupboard.

Alex caught the clock above the stove. It was oval and a little dated and certainly more at home in a Norman Rockwell painting.

What time is it, Mr. Wolf?
he wondered uneasily.

The floor was turquoise and green linoleum. The same ones he’d seen in a church basement too long ago to remember exactly when.

No matter where Alex looked, he couldn’t help but notice how neat and tidy everything was. A voice called out from the backroom of his mind:
A little too neat and tidy
. He tried to ignore it, listening while the reverend explained to Sheriff Crow that he had left the church late tonight and had eaten at Kentucky Fried Chicken—one of his little weaknesses, he told them. That charming smile made another appearance.

The voice in Alex’s head was growing louder, rising to an almost painful frequency. He rose and excused himself to the bathroom, and as he left the room he could have sworn he had seen the reverend’s eyes flash with momentary alarm and then anger. It had lasted only a fraction of a second, and Sheriff Crow hadn’t been the wiser, but Alex knew he had seen an avalanche of thoughts behind the old man’s eyes.

Alex went through the living room and then down the hall and into a small study. On the desk was an old Royal typewriter and beside it a thick ream of paper. Alex flipped through what looked like hundreds of typed pages. The reverend was writing a book, it seemed, but the snippets he managed to steal at a glance were hardly enough to get a handle on what it was about. He flipped back and read the title page: The Coming Judgment. It made him think of a bumper sticker he had seen on an old beat-up station wagon. When the rapture starts rockin’, guess who’s gonna come knockin’.

You gotta give it to the thumpers, he thought satirically. Love thy neighbor. Turn the other cheek. Peace and happiness for all. Oh, and by the way, that loving hand of God’s gonna sweep us all away when the judgment comes
.

Above the typewriter he saw an old black and white picture. Two men standing before Millingham High School smiling. Judging by the long hair and the lamb chops, he guessed the picture was taken in the sixties, perhaps around the time the school was first built. Alex leaned farther over the desk, his nose nearly pressed against the glass. He could see that the man on the left was a young Reverend Small. Beside him on the right, arms draped over each other’s shoulder, was James McMurphy. He smiled and was about to turn away when the photograph changed. He eyed it more closely. Now both barrels of a shotgun had been stuffed into McMurphy’s mouth, his lips stretched so wide they looked about ready to split. Alex’s palms broke out in a sweat. A blinding bout of paranoia suddenly gripped him.

Pictures don’t change on their own
.

He turned back to the picture, becoming more and more certain that his imagination was doing what one would expect when running on three hours of sleep. But the picture had once again metamorphisized. Now McMurphy’s face was contorted into a terrible shudder—reminiscent of that look plastered on the faces of human crash test dummies at the moment of impact. Now something new was lying at their feet and sprayed against the back wall.