did you get that idea?” Mummers asked. “Nobody’s ever walked away from here, and I’d bet a year’s wages nobody ever will.”
“I assumed he didn’t have a phone. But I got a call from him.”
“Phone in his room? Of course he doesn’t.”
“If legal counsel wants to talk to him without coming out there, how is it done?”
“He’s fitted with restraints and taken to an obcon room that has a no-hands phone.”
“What’s obcon?”
“Observed-conference room. We watch him through a window, but it’s a privileged conversation, so we can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s in restraints and he’s watched to be sure he doesn’t pry anything out of the phone, anything sharp that might be a weapon.”
“He called me a little more than ten minutes ago,” John said. “On my home-office line. He must have gotten possession of a phone.”
Mummers was silent for a moment. Then: “What’s your number?”
John gave it to him.
“We’ll have to toss his room,” Mummers said. “Can I get back to you in half an hour?”
“I’ll be here.”
While he waited to hear from Dennis Mummers, John went online to a series of dot-gov sites, accessing information available to the public, but also restricted information that he could view only with his police pass code.
The need had arisen to confirm that Coleman Hanes was the man he appeared to be. John had given the state-hospital orderly the unlisted number that Billy Lucas had called, and he could think of no other way that the killer could have obtained it.
In minutes, he ascertained that the Marine Corps emblem tattooed on the palm of Hanes’s right hand was not in support of a fraudulent persona. The orderly served admirably in the Marine Corps, was decorated and honorably discharged.
Hanes had no criminal history in this state or in any state with which it shared information. Even his driving record was without a blemish.
The truth of military service and the lack of a police record did not clear him of having colluded with Billy Lucas, but it made the possibility less likely than it otherwise might have been.
When Dennis Mummers called back, he said, “Billy doesn’t have a phone. Are you certain it was him?”
“His voice was unmistakable.”
“It is distinct,” Mummers acknowledged. “But how often have you spoken with him before your visit here?”
Deflecting the question, John said, “He mentioned something to me that only he could know, related to my interview with him.”
“Did he threaten you?”
If John confirmed the threat, they would expect him to file a report, and if he did so, they would learn that he had no authority to involve himself in the Lucas case.
“No,” he lied. “No threat. What did Billy say when you searched his room for a phone?”
“He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.”
“Is there a chance maybe someone on the staff might have allowed him to use their cell phone?”
“Depending on the circumstances,” Dennis Mummers said, “that could be a reason for dismissal. No one would risk it.”
“In this work, Officer Mummers, I’ve learned some people will risk everything, everything, for the most trivial of reasons. But thank you for your assistance.”
After he hung up, John went to the kitchen, where he turned on just the light in the exhaust hood over the cooktop.
Most of their friends drank wine, but for the few with a taste for something stronger, they kept a small bar in a kitchen cabinet. Certain that he could get back to sleep only with assistance, he poured a double Scotch over ice.
He was disturbed less by the threat Billy Lucas had made than by the last words the murderous boy had spoken on the phone.
To the best of his recollection, John had never shared with the police any of what the murderer of his parents and sisters, Alton Turner Blackwood, had said before he died. John had been mute with grief and terror, but Blackwood had tried to distract him with talk.
The next-to-last thing Blackwood said on that long-ago night was word for word the last thing Billy said on the phone less than an hour earlier: Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.
Zach dreamed that he woke in his dark bedroom and saw a blade of amber radiance slicing out of the closet, under the door. In the dream, he lay staring at this narrow brightness, trying to remember if he had extinguished the closet light before going to bed, and he decided that, yes, he had turned it off.
He switched on his nightstand lamp, which left most of the room still in shadows, and he got up from the bed and slowly approached the closet, behaving exactly like your typical bonehead in a brain-dead horror movie where everyone dies because everyone is terminally stupid. When he put his hand on the doorknob, the light in the closet went out.
Someone or some godawful thing had to be in there to operate the switch, so the worst of all dumb-ass moves would be to open the closet without having a weapon. Nevertheless, Zach watched his hand rotate the knob, as though he had no control over it, as though this also must be one of those movies in which a clueless dork undergoes a hand transplant and the hand has a mind of its own.
This was when he began to realize he was dreaming – because his hands were the same pair with which he’d been born, and they always did only what he intended them to do. With that fluid transitional dissolve common to dreams, he never opened the door, yet abruptly it stood wide, and he was poised on the threshold of the pitch-black closet.
Out of that lightless hole, enormous hands seized him, one by the throat, the other gripping his face, meaty palm crushing his nose, stoppering his mouth, his scream, his breath.
He seized the hand that cupped his face, frantic to break free, the wrist as massive as a horse’s hock, hard gnarl of bones, thick tendons. Cold, greasy fingertips bigger than soup spoons digging at his eyes, and no breath, no breath—
Sucking breath at last, Zach startled up in bed, the nightmare bursting away like a shattering shell.
The thunder of his heart pealed through him, but even as his dream fear quickly subsided from its peak, he saw that the fright-flick scenario of his sleep played out also in the waking world. In the true darkness of the real room, the blade of amber light knifed through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.
Earlier, when the door swung open on its own, he dismissed it as the house settling, the door
