Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (15 page)

On the other side of the bed Artie’s ghost shimmered in front of the window, light passing through his diaphanous form as though he were nothing more than an afterimage burned into Jack’s eyes. The memory of something he had seen, rather than the actual thing. It occurred to Jack how true that was, and he shuddered.

The ghost would not even look at Molly. Instead, Artie stared out the window and hugged himself as though he were cold. Jack wondered if that was possible, if it was cold for them over there in the Ghostlands. If they could feel it.

“Molly,” he said softly.

Eyes red more from lack of sleep than tears, she lifted her head from Courtney’s shoulder and looked up at him. Her red hair fell in tendrils across her face and Molly brushed them away. Though he had seen her do things that were extraordinarily courageous, in that moment, there in his sister’s arms, in her nightshirt, Molly looked like a little girl to him, soft and vulnerable.

There were long scratches on her throat where the beast had grabbed her. Thin trails of blood trickled from them and stained her shirt. On her forehead there was a welt where she had struck her head. Jack could see it in his mind, the way the Prowler must have thrown her when he had called out; he understood that she had crashed into the bookshelf and hoped that she was not hurt any worse than he could see.

“I . . . I hit him once but it didn’t stop him.” It was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to say. “He’s gone, though.”

“But he’ll be back,” Molly said, her voice hushed. “I heard him say that. He’ll be back.”

Jack bristled. “Maybe not. I wounded him. He’s bleeding. He was probably just talking big to make up for the fact that he turned tail and ran.”

Courtney gazed up at him gravely. “He called you by name, Jack. Somebody went out of their way to set it up so Bill wasn’t here when this happened, and that thing called you by name. He
will
be back.”

Anger burned in him and Jack went to crouch by them.

“Let him come. We’ll be waiting.”

Jace Castillo rubbed tiredly at his eyes and let out a long breath. The Boston P.D. homicide division was airconditioned, of course, but whoever wielded the authority to control the thermostat was stingy at best. While not nearly so warm as it was outside, most would have been hard-pressed to call the temperature cool. As a result, the air in the building was close and stale. Castillo had not showered in going on twenty hours and his skin felt grimy, oily. All in all, he would rather have been outside sweating. At least then he could have breathed fresh air.

What made it worse was that Bill Cantwell, despite his size and the fact that the man had been working at the pub most of the day, seemed fresh as the proverbial daisy. His eyes were bright and alive, his features open and aware. The bartender’s hair was a mess, but beyond that, he looked ready for just about anything.

It pissed Castillo off.

“So you’re sure you never saw the guy in the trunk before tonight?” he asked, scratching idly at the back of his head.

Cantwell sighed, though not impatiently. “I appreciate that you have to at least pretend to do this by the book, Detective. Make it look like a real investigation. But you and I both know that is not what’s going to happen here.” The big man had a gravelly voice that, like his overall appearance, made it difficult to judge his actual age. Castillo would have put him at forty, but he might have been off a few years in either direction. It would be simple enough to find out, but when Castillo had run Cantwell’s name he had found that the man had no criminal record and so had not bothered to look at much else. The bartender had played professional football for the New England Patriots some years before. It would not be difficult to get a whole dossier on him if necessary.

The thing was, Cantwell was not the problem. It would be easier if he had been.

“Please answer the question, Mr. Cantwell,” Castillo instructed.

Cantwell’s nostrils flared angrily but his face hardly betrayed his pique otherwise. “I already answered the question. Several times. The dead guy isn’t familiar to me. Even if his face wasn’t torn up, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t recognize him.”

“And you have no idea how the corpse got into your trunk?”

The big man lost his cool. His open palm slapped the table like a thunderclap and it shook with the impact.

“What are you screwing around for?” Cantwell demanded, eyes narrowing dangerously. “I came down because I know you’ve got to cover your asses on anything like this. I get that. But we’re both tired, Castillo. You want to keep asking the same pointless questions, come see me at Bridget’s tomorrow and you can ask all you want as long as your ass is on a bar stool and you’ve got a beer in your hand.” With that he stood up. Sitting across from him, gazing upward, Castillo had a moment to appreciate how big Bill Cantwell actually was. Not freakishly so, to be sure, but imposing without doubt. The lieutenant who ran Boston Homicide, Hall Boggs, was taller, maybe even wider, but across the shoulders and in the arms, Cantwell was bigger.

The detective sat back in his chair and rubbed again at his eyes.

“Why you, Bill?” he asked.

Cantwell frowned and glared skeptically down at him. “Now we’re back to first names,
Jace?”

“Why do you think we’re in the break room and not one of the interview rooms?” Castillo asked.

“You wanted to be alone with me?”

Castillo chuckled softly and nodded. “Pretty much, yeah. There’s no observation area for this room. Anything we talk about, I don’t want anybody listening in even if they’re on the job. The wrong person gets wind of what this is all really about . . .” His words trailed off and he sighed, then gestured to Cantwell. “Look, why don’t you sit down another minute.” Grudgingly, the big man sat.

“You know all this. Even if we’ve never really talked it out. You and the Dwyers and the Hatcher girl, you know what we know. Truth is, I’m pretty sure you know more than we do. So you know why we keep it as quiet as we can. Before I was with homicide I used to work narcotics. Honestly, there are a lot of truths the public is better off not knowing because as long as we do our jobs the odds that they’ll be affected by those things are almost nil.

“And we do, Bill. We do our jobs.”

Cantwell nodded grimly. “I’m not saying you don’t. We’ve been over this. I know why you brought me here. You know how this guy really died. But you keep asking me these questions when you know I had nothing to do—”

“Don’t presume to tell me what I know,” Castillo interrupted.

The bartender studied him carefully. The detective folded his hands on the table and leaned over to make sure he had the man’s full attention.

“I don’t
know
you didn’t kill this guy. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it went down, but I don’t
know
it. I don’t know
you.
What I do know is that you and your friends were instrumental in cleaning out one of the worst . . . pest problems this city has ever had. I know you’ve had at least one other run-in with that sort of pest. But even if you didn’t kill the guy, someone put him there to get your attention. Maybe you have an idea who that might be. Not
what,
’cause you’re right that we’re both pretty sold on the answer to that question, but
who
specifically. Makes sense to me to wonder if you knew the dead guy.”

Cantwell let out a long slow breath and Castillo was forced to revise his impression. The man did look tired.

“Not so far as I could tell,” the bartender said. “But when you identify the body, let me know and I’ll be able to say for sure.”

The hum of the snack machines on the far side of the room suddenly seemed too loud, and the flicker of a dying fluorescent light above was beginning to give Castillo a headache. Cantwell was making it worse.

“I get the idea there are things you’re not telling me, Bill.”

“You get the strangest ideas, Jace.”

The two men stared at each other for a time, but then the moment was broken by a knock at the door. Castillo did not bother to reply, but the door swung open anyway.

Lieutenant Boggs filled the doorway. “You almost finished here, Detective?”

“We’re done,” Castillo confirmed.

Boggs glanced curiously at Cantwell, then nodded. “Good. Why don’t you run Mr. Cantwell back to Bridget’s then. You’re going to need to take a statement, have a look around.”

Castillo had half-turned to look at the lieutenant when the man had come in, but now he swiveled all the way around in his chair. “The crime scene unit was almost done when I left. We’ve taken all the statements I think we’re going to need, Lieu.” Boggs shook his head. “Not about the DOA. About twenty minutes ago, someone B&E’d the place, assaulted at least one person on the premises. We had two separate calls from the neighborhood about shots fired, but the guy who phoned it in, Dwyer, didn’t say anything about that.”

“He wouldn’t,” Castillo replied dryly.

But even before the words were out, Cantwell sprang from the chair and strode toward the door. Lieutenant Boggs stepped out of his way and Castillo had to rush to catch up with the bartender out in the hall. He had gotten the idea Cantwell and the Dwyer woman were involved, and now he was pretty certain of that.

“Hey, hey, slow down,” the detective urged him. “It’s over. Doesn’t sound like anyone was seriously injured.”

“Yeah? Well when I figure out who’s behind this, that’s going to change,” Cantwell replied, his voice a low growl that startled Castillo with its ferocity.

“You think the two things are related?” the detective asked.

As they rushed down the steps toward the door, Cantwell cast him a sidelong glance.

“Don’t you?”

C H A P T E R 8

Morning came too soon. Even after one of the longest nights of his life, Jack cursed the daylight. Bill had returned to the pub by three o’clock in the morning with Detective Castillo, who put a patrol car in the alley for the rest of the night. The detective had asked a few questions, poked around the kitchen and the alley, and then left. Once Jack had told him it was a Prowler, Castillo knew all he needed to know. There would be no crime scene unit in the apartment. Castillo would keep in touch, and so should they.

Jack had taken Molly to the hospital, where they had cleaned the scratches on her throat—none of which, thankfully, required stitches—and checked her to make sure she didn’t have a concussion. Then the doctors had sent them home. They had to call the police, of course, so Jack gave them Castillo’s number. The last thing he needed was some nurse filing a report that implied he had beaten Molly up.

It was five in the morning when they got back, and the sky was already lightening. Molly fell asleep in the Jeep on the way home and he had to guide her up the stairs and into her room. He worried that she would be afraid to sleep in there alone, but she was snoring softly within seconds of her head hitting the pillow.

Courtney had also been sleeping when he got back, but Bill had been awake and sitting in the kitchen. He cleaned up what little glass had actually fallen inside rather than out, and replaced the screen despite the damage. Jack had been dubious about his own chances of getting any sleep, but with Bill there watching over them and his shades drawn, he drifted off after only a few minutes.

To his dismay, however, he had found it impossible to sleep past nine o’clock. Not wanting to disturb anyone else he had moved quietly through the apartment. Molly was still sleeping, sprawled across the bed in what would be her room only for a few more weeks. In Courtney’s room, Bill lay on his back with one arm thrown over his head, a low, rattling snore issuing from his open mouth. But there was no sign of Courtney herself. Jack stiffened a moment before he realized that Bill would not have gone to sleep unless Courtney had gotten up. It still bothered Jack to see Bill in his sister’s bed, but this morning that small discomfort was the last thing on his mind.

On the kitchen table he found a note from Courtney.

Went to market. Called alarm company. Back soon.

Jack never ceased to marvel at his sister’s capacity to rebound from things that would at the very least knock the wind out of the average person. On what was probably no more than three or four hours sleep, she had gotten up and gone to the seafood market to get the pub ready for business. Jack himself hadn’t had any more sleep than that, but his was a case of having been unable to sleep. Courtney had chosen to get up.

It didn’t help that he felt guilty because he had told her that
he
would go to the market this morning, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

His gaze went to the hastily scrawled note again.
Called alarm company.
More than likely she meant to have the windows wired to the alarm system. It made sense to Jack, but for it to be really effective, they might have to finally get central air-conditioning in the apartment so they could actually close the windows on hot summer nights. Not that he was going to complain.

It was a beautiful summer morning, already above eighty degrees he was sure. Out the shattered kitchen window was nothing but blue sky and sunshine. The wind must have changed, he realized, because the breeze that came through the apartment now actually brought some comfort. An ocean breeze, then, off the harbor.

Though he wished he had been able to sleep, he knew it was best for him to be up and around now. There were far too many menacing things happening for him to sleep any longer. He felt lost enough trying to figure out what the Ravenous was and how to destroy it, how to stop it from consuming the lost souls in the Ghostlands. How to keep Artie safe. But now he had to deal with this as well.

Though no one could prove it, even Detective Castillo agreed that it seemed likely that the golden-furred Prowler who had broken in and tried to kill Molly—probably meaning to kill them all—had also planted the corpse in Bill’s trunk. And Castillo did not know what the rest of them knew, what Bill told them when the detective was gone. The scent the intruder had left behind was the same. They knew for certain it was the same beast. In some ways that was better; it might mean there was just the one. In others, though, it was even more unnerving.