all dead.”
“Who is dead, sir?”
“My mother, father, grandmother. My sister.”
“Who is this?”
“Billy Lucas. I’m fourteen.”
“What’s your address there?”
“You know it already. It came up on your screen when I called.”
“Have you checked them for signs of life?”
“Yes, I checked them very closely for signs of life.”
“Have you had any first-aid training?”
“Trust me, they’re dead. I killed them. I killed them hard.”
“You killed them? Son, if this is a prank—”
“This isn’t a prank. The prank is over. I pranked them all. I pranked them good. Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing. Good-bye now. I’ll be waiting for you on the front porch.”
Along the county road came two vehicles behind headlights. Seen through the smeared and misted windows, through the deluge, they had little detail and resembled bathyscaphes motoring through an oceanic trench.
As John watched the traffic pass, the puddled blacktop blazing in their beams, bright reflections coruscating along his streaming windows, the afternoon was further distorted and made strange. He was plagued by confusion, disconcerted to find himself – a man of reason – wandering in a fog of superstition.
He felt adrift in space and time, memory as valid as the moment.
Twenty years earlier and half a continent from here, four people had been murdered in their home. The Valdane family.
They had lived less than a third of a mile from the house in which John Calvino was raised. He knew them all. He went to school with Darcy Valdane and nursed a secret crush on her. He’d been fourteen at the time.
Elizabeth Valdane, the mother, was stabbed with a butcher knife. Like Sandra Lucas, Billy’s mother, Elizabeth had been found dead in her kitchen. Both women were wheelchair-bound.
Elizabeth’s husband, Anthony Valdane, was brutally bludgeoned with a hammer. The killer left the claw end of the implement embedded in the victim’s shattered skull – as Billy, too, had left the hammer in his father’s head.
Anthony had been attacked while sitting at the workbench in his garage; Robert Lucas had been clubbed to death in his study. As the hammer arced down, Anthony was building a birdhouse; Robert was writing a check to the electric company. Birds went homeless, bills went unpaid.
Victoria, Elizabeth Valdane’s sister, a widow who lived with them, had been punched in the face and strangled with a red silk scarf. Ann Lucas, Billy’s grandmother, a recent widow, was punched and subsequently strangled with such ferocity that the scarf – red this time, too – cut deep into her throat. The women’s relationships to their families were not identical, but eerily similar.
Fifteen-year-old Darcy Valdane endured rape before being stabbed to death with the same butcher knife used on her mother. Twenty years later, Celine Lucas, sixteen, was raped – and then butchered with the same blade used on her mother.
Darcy had suffered nine knife wounds. Celine, too, was stabbed nine times.
Then I stabbed her precisely nine times …
Why did you say “precisely”?
Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine.
In both cases, the order of the murders was the same: mother, father, widowed aunt/grandmother, and finally the daughter.
John Calvino’s laptop directory contained a document titled “Then-Now,” which he had composed over the past few days, listing the similarities between the Valdane-family and the Lucas-family murders. He didn’t need to bring it to the screen, for he had committed it to memory.
A flatbed truck, transporting a large and arcane piece of farm machinery, roared past, casting up a spray of dirty water. In the murky light, the machine looked insectile and prehistoric, furthering the quality of unreality that characterized this drowned afternoon.
Cocooned in his car, as wind ceaselessly spun filaments of rain around it, John considered the faces of two murderers that phased like moons through his mind’s eye.
The Lucas family had been destroyed by one of their own, by handsome blue-eyed Billy, honor student and choirboy, his features smooth and innocent.
The Valdanes, who had no son, were murdered by an intruder whose looks were less appealing than those of Billy Lucas.
That long-ago killer had committed additional atrocities against three other families in the months that followed the Valdane murders. During the last of those crimes, he’d been shot to death.
The journal that he left behind, hundreds of handwritten pages, suggested that he had killed often prior to the Valdanes, generally one victim at a time. He didn’t name them or say where those murders were committed. He didn’t care to brag – until he started to kill entire families and felt that his work was then worthy of admiration. Aside from the story of his detestable origins, the journal consisted mostly of a demented philosophical ramble about death with a lowercase d and about what it was like to be Death with an uppercase D. He believed he had become “an immortal aspect” of the grim reaper.
His true name was Alton Turner Blackwood. He had lived under the false name Asmodeus. Itinerant, he had traveled ceaselessly in a series of stolen vehicles or hobo-style in boxcars, or sometimes as a ticketed passenger on buses. A vagrant, he slept in whatever vehicle he currently possessed, in abandoned buildings, in homeless shelters, in culverts and under bridges, in the backseats of twisted wrecks in automobile junkyards, in any shed left unlocked, once in an open grave covered by a canopy raised for a morning burial service, and secretly in church basements.
He stood six feet five, scarecrow-thin but strong. His hands were immense, the spatulate fingers as suctorial as the toe discs of a web-foot toad. Large bony wrists like robot joints, orangutan-long arms. His shoulder blades were thick and malformed, so that bat wings appeared to be furled under his shirt.
After each of the first three families had been savaged, Alton Blackwood had rung 911, not from the site of the murders, but from a public phone. His vanity required that the bodies be found while they were fresh, before the flamboyant process of decomposition upstaged his handiwork.
Blackwood was long dead, the four cases were closed, and the crimes occurred in a small city with inadequate protocols for the archiving of 911 calls. Of the three messages the killer had left, only one remained, regarding the second family, the Sollenburgs.
The previous day, John had solicited a copy of the recording, ostensibly as part of the Lucas investigation, and had received it by email as an MP3 file. He had loaded it into his laptop. Now he played it again.
When
