The River Is Dark (16 page)

“Do you remember why you’re here?” Liam said as gently as he could. Eric nodded, his hair scratching against the pillow behind him. “Do you want to talk to me about it?”

Eric bit his lower lip and looked toward the window, a slat of light coating his face. “They didn’t believe me,” he said after a while.

“Who didn’t?”

“The guys who were here this morning. They asked me all kinds of questions, and when I told them, I could see they thought I was lying or something.”

Liam came closer and placed his hand on Eric’s exposed bicep, where there were no tubes or needles. “I’ll believe you.” The boy turned his head and studied Liam’s face, as if searching for a hidden joke there.

“My mom and dad are dead.” It was a statement, and Liam was grateful it wasn’t a question. “I remember almost everything from that night, but it’s kind of like a dream too.”

“Just tell us what happened if you can,” Liam said, squeezing his arm. Eric nodded and closed his eyes.

“It came through the door, and Champ ran right at it. But it had this thing in its hands, a big piece of pointed steel, and it hit Champ with it. My dad—” Eric stopped, and his eyelids scrunched closed further, as if he could shut out the vision inside his head. “My dad ran at it, and it stabbed him. That’s when my mom made me run. She started screaming to run away and hide, so I did.”

Tears leaked from beneath his eyelids, and Liam felt Dani nudge his arm. He glanced at her as she shook her head. He didn’t like it any more than she did, but they needed Eric to keep talking.

“What did you do then?” Liam asked.

“I ran,” Eric whispered. “I ran upstairs and I heard my mom screaming and it was roaring something . . . something like—” His tearstained eyes opened, his eyelashes coated in moisture like pine boughs after a rain. “I can’t remember what it said. I hid under Mom and Dad’s bed and called 911. It came looking for me, and it pulled the bed away from me. It knew I was in there.” Eric’s frame quaked beneath the blanket, and Liam willed the boy’s nerves to hold. “I saw it raise the sword, and then that was it until I woke up here.”

Liam licked his lips. “Eric, you say ‘it.’ It was a man, right?”

The boy’s eyes got very large. “It was a monster.”

“If I showed you a drawing, would you be able to tell me if it looked like the monster?”

Eric nodded. Liam motioned to Dani, who opened the sketchpad and turned it to the correct page before facing the picture toward Eric.

Immediately the boy stiffened, and Liam heard the quiet beeping of the heart monitor begin to pick up speed. “That’s it,” Eric gasped. “That’s it.” His eyes sought out Liam’s. “Why do you have a picture of it?” The fear in his voice was palpable.

“Because I saw it too,” Liam said.

Eric watched him for a long time. Finally, he nodded and frowned. “Why aren’t Dr. Dempsey and Suzie here?”

Liam grimaced internally. The boy didn’t know yet. He studied his young face and knew the kid couldn’t possibly weather another two deaths of people he cared for. “They couldn’t come, but we came instead,” Liam said. He saw the boy’s gaze flit to the picture Dani held and then back. “What is it, Eric?”

“When it looked at me, I could see—” Eric squirmed in the bed, the heart-rate monitor beginning to chirp again.

“What could you see?” Liam asked, leaning forward.

“In its eyes, it hated me.”

Liam squeezed Eric’s arm one last time before withdrawing his hand. “You’re safe now, Eric. No one’s going to hurt you, you have my word.”

Liam took the sketchpad from Dani and grabbed a pen from a desk in the corner of the room. After scribbling his cell number on a page, he tore it out and folded it into Eric’s hand. “If you need something or want to tell me anything else, you call me, day or night, okay?”

Eric nodded, and Liam smiled at him as he and Dani turned away.

“I lost one of my arms,” Eric said in a hushed voice, stopping them just before the doorway. “I like to play baseball, and now . . .” He trailed off and glanced at the distended bandages around the stump to his right.

Liam leaned against the doorjamb, looking at the boy. “You ever heard of Jim Abbott?” Liam asked. Eric shook his head. “He was a pitcher for the Angels, the Brewers, the White Sox, and the Yankees. He threw a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians, and you know what?”

“What?”

“He only had one hand.” Liam smiled at the expression of wonder that crossed the boy’s face. They waved at Eric one last time and left the room. After Dani retrieved her purse from the officer by the door, she grasped Liam’s hand and pulled him close to kiss him on the cheek.

“What was that for?” he asked as they neared the elevators.

“For hope,” she said, and stepped through the doors as they opened.

CHAPTER 19

They stopped for lunch at a small Italian restaurant in the center of Dayton and ate at a table outside, in the shade of an enormous umbrella.

As Liam finished the last of his chicken primavera, he noticed Dani studying the drawing on the pad.

“You’re very good, I meant to tell you that earlier,” he said.

She looked up at him through a few strands of loose hair. “You’re just saying that.”

“No, really, I don’t know anyone else that can draw a mutated murderer any better.” Balling up a used napkin, she threw it at him. “But seriously, you have a ton of talent—I mean it. I think you should start selling prints online or something.”

“Of this?” she asked, tapping the face on the paper.

“Well, it might appeal to some people. I know I’d buy a few for the house.” She laughed as the waitress came to take the credit card he’d set on top of the bill. “I think you could do well,” he continued. “This is your real passion, right?”

“Yes, but it won’t pay the bills—not right away anyhow, but someday maybe.”

Dani’s eyes became wistful. He imagined them sitting across from each other at the table in his house just as they were now. The rightness of the image caught him off-guard, and he looked away from her toward the street.

“So what’s next?” she asked after the waitress thanked them and moved away to clear a nearby table.

“We go back to the hotel and start over,” Liam said, scratching his signature onto the receipt.

“With or without clothes?” Dani said, and laughed at the way his mouth opened.

He shook his head as they started walking to the Chevy. “Incorrigible” was all he said before climbing inside.

The air seemed to thicken as they neared Tallston. The weight of it pressed through the vents of the truck with coils of humidity the air-conditioning couldn’t disperse. He tried to dispel the feeling by turning the fan up another notch, and wondered if it was the weather or something else that hung over him, the sensation of being crushed beneath an unrelenting, invisible rock.

As they pulled through the small town, Dani turned her head toward the passenger window and stared out at the sun-drenched streets. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just go swimming or something? Go for a boat ride on the river without this hanging over our heads?”

“It would be great,” he agreed. “I haven’t been on a vacation in years.”

The thought of a carefree trip was so enticing it was the equivalent of a starving man being shown a steak dinner just out of reach. The relief of telling Dani about his past was an immeasurable burden laid on the ground after carrying it for so long; at least, it felt that way in her presence. But the thought of a vacation on which he could actually enjoy himself was still too sweet to consider. Just as he began to imagine what it would be like, the building where Kelly’s husband lived with his two surviving children bloomed across his inner eye. The rough brick beneath his knuckles, Kelly’s last name near the buzzer, the feeling of the plastic button’s surface under his finger.

“Liam, look out!” Dani yelled.

He came back to himself just in time to stomp the brakes and avoid the woman crossing the street in front of the truck. The Chevy’s hood came up almost to her shoulders and obscured most of her from view. His heart felt as if it were trying to pry itself from his chest. The woman turned her head beneath the dark shawl she wore to give the truck and its occupants a fleeting look before continuing on her way across the street.

“Shit! Where did she come from?” Liam asked as he let the truck roll forward again.

“I don’t know, she was just there all of a sudden.”

He gave the woman a last glance over his shoulder, noting the shabby look of her pants and the stained shirt she wore. “Must be a homeless person.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Dani said.

They parked in front of Liam’s hotel, and the unyielding heat tried to crush them as they walked inside. Only a minute had passed after shutting Liam’s door when a knock brought him back to the hall. A kid no older than eighteen dressed in a tan uniform stood outside the door holding a bouquet of white lilies and a large envelope.

“Yes?”

“Are you Mr. Dempsey?”

“Yes.”

The kid handed him the flowers and envelope. “Here you are, sir.”

“Thank you,” Liam said. The heft of the envelope surprised him. He turned it over as he walked back into the room but could find no markings on its outside. The card suspended within the flowers said,
Sharing in your sorrow
. Liam tore the envelope open and pulled out documents obviously made on an old copy machine.

“What is it?” Dani asked, looking over his shoulder.

“The Shevlins’ medical files,” he said, shuffling through them. “Grace came through—everything’s here. I knew her dog loved me.”

They cleared the table and stacked the case notes in a pile at one corner before spreading out the new information. It was an ocean of white with several blurry photocopied images of x-rays mixed in.

“Let’s find the earliest visit, shall we?” Liam said. They slowly searched through the pages, comparing dates, until they narrowed it down to a single document.

“A death certificate?” Dani asked.

“Yes, for their first son, Peter.”

Liam scanned the paper. Seeing the date of birth and death as the same day was off-putting, but he continued on, noting the signatures of both Jerry and Karen on the left-hand side beneath the title
Relatives
. On the right, his eyes fixed on his brother’s name under the heading of
M.D.

“Allen signed off on the death.” He read out loud the text written in his brother’s swooping and almost illegible hand. “ ‘Cause of death: Breech birth leading to nuchal cord strangulation. Infant was born immotile and unresponsive.’ ”

“That’s terrible,” Dani said.

Liam nodded, setting the page down. “So that looks like the first instance they were involved with one another. Everything else is just checkups, random colds . . . and it looks like Eric broke his arm when he was seven, the same arm he lost.”

“Maybe there’s no connection between them other than being friends,” Dani said, sitting back from the table to stretch. “Maybe the donations were just like Grace said, a little reminder to Karen that they should’ve had the baby in a hospital, not at home.”

Liam tapped his forehead. “Maybe.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not.” Liam glanced at the death certificate again, and something hooked his attention. He brought the page close to his face, turning it over several times.

“What is it?” Dani asked.

“There was another document attached to this page,” he said, pointing to the two negative images of small staple holes in the upper left corner. “But it was removed.”

He dropped the certificate onto the rest of the pages and shuffled through them. After some time, he sat back again, looking out the window at the thick afternoon sunlight. “There aren’t any other loose pages here that are torn or show signs of stapling. That means it either got thrown away or it’s somewhere else.”

He stood and moved to his bag, retrieving the holster from inside, the Sig nestled within the leather.

“Where are we going?” Dani asked.

“I’m going back to the Shevlins’ to look in the file cabinets we didn’t get to go through the other day.”

“I thought you said it was too risky to go back there since they’d have a patrol watching the place.”

Liam strained to fit the holster into the back of his pants. “Don’t have a choice now. I need to put this together, give Phelps something he can’t deny, before someone else is killed. I’m guessing they’re more concerned with watching Allen and Suzie’s at the present, not the Shevlins’. Plus, we didn’t give them any reason to think we’d been out there.”

Dani watched him latch his belt in place and make the final adjustments to the holster. “Don’t even think you’re leaving me here while you go back there, ’cause it isn’t happening.”

He sighed. She looked so beautiful, outlined by the window behind her; even the defiance on her face pulled her features into something becoming. “I’m going alone, and I don’t care if you get mad at me or not. I won’t put you in harm’s way again. I was stupid to do it in the first place.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“No, I can’t, but I can make you understand.” He crossed the space between them and grasped her by the shoulders. “I don’t know what would’ve happened the other night if you would’ve been with me at the house.”

“I might’ve been able to save you from almost getting skinned.”

“Yeah, and you might’ve gotten killed too,” he said, with more force than he intended. Dani tried to shrug his hands away, but he held her tight. “Dani, I care about you, a lot.” She shifted in his grip but looked up at him and chewed on her lip. “I won’t endanger you again. I won’t.”

He let her go and moved to his bag, reaching inside for the second of the three magazines he’d brought for the Sig. He almost grabbed the third one but opted against it, not knowing where he would carry it comfortably.

“You can’t live this way, you know,” she said quietly.

“What way?”

“Like everything you touch is glass. You can’t live like it all could break at any moment—no one can.”

He was about to refute what she said, but stopped, knowing anything he tried to say would be a half truth or less. “I’ll drop you off at your hotel if you want,” he finally said.

Dani looked at the floor. “I’ll walk.”

He opened his mouth but then shut it, unwilling to push her any further than he already had. “I’ll call you soon,” he said, moving to the door. When he heard no answer, he left the room. The last he saw of her was her back as she turned away.