CHAPTER 4
It took the better part of an hour to get Gary out of my apartment, which both made me feel better and worse. When he was gone I sat on the couch with a pillow hugged against my chest, staring blindly at nothing.
It was inconceivable to me that my mother had been some sort of mystic. The woman I’d known for a few scant months had held her cards close to the chest, always judging and never commenting. I’d spent four months with her and, when she died, felt as though I’d known nothing more about her than she liked Altoids. There’d been no real mourning, at least not on my part. Confusion, yes, and, not to be delicate about it, a whole lot of resentment. She’d disrupted a life in which I had not missed her to any noticeable degree in order to have me witness her death. She’d been young, only fifty-three, and in extremely good health. I’d been left with the impression that she was bored of life, and as such saw fit to leave it under her own power.
It appeared that the power in question was more literal than I’d thought. I mean, anybody who could will herself to death wasn’t a person whose emotional state was one I wanted to tangle with. She might decide it was time for me to die, and I might not be tough enough to argue. I hadn’t even tried arguing in favor of her life, which probably made me a very bad daughter.
Not that there was any really compelling reason to be a good daughter to the woman who’d abandoned me when I was a few months old. We hadn’t liked each other as adults. I could only assume she hadn’t much cared for me as a baby, either.
A fine thread of emptiness wove through me, an ache that I’d spent the better part of my life resolutely ignoring. I hadn’t been given up for adoption by a mother who thought it was best for me. I’d been dumped on a father who hadn’t known I existed until that moment, by a mother who evidently didn’t like me very much. It was not something I enjoyed thinking about.
Especially as it reminded me, inevitably, of a boy growing up in North Carolina, whom I had known full well I couldn’t properly mother. Not at fifteen. Not in the confusion of mourning the sister who’d been born with him, and who’d died just minutes later, too small to live.
I set my teeth together and put my forehead against the pillow, shoving away every thought of family ties that came haunting me. Introspection was not my strong suit. I didn’t like to look back, and I wasn’t prepared for the past, in the form of my dead mother, to come calling.
I fell asleep sometime after midnight, still wrapped around the scratchy couch pillow.
Monday March 21, 8:20 a.m.
There was a place on the other side of sleep that I’d been to, where I’d walked among the dead and spoken with them. The plan—a plan which I didn’t have any intention of mentioning aloud, not even to myself—had been to whoosh through dreamtime, find the dead women and learn who’d killed them, then jaunt off to work like Don Juan triumphant.
Instead I woke up stiff and disoriented the next morning, curled up on the solitary couch cushion, without having had a single moment’s otherworldly experience while I slept. An ache of uselessness welled up behind my eyes. Not only did I not understand what was going on, but the baser part of me didn’t care. Having it all go away would have been far more within my comfort zone.
I had just used the phrase comfort zone with all due seriousness, right inside my own head. I clearly needed to get up, stick my head in a bowl of cold water, and drink a pot of strong coffee. Which I did, except it was a hot shower instead of a cold bowl, and I swear I didn’t drink more than three cups of coffee. Honest.
I called a cab—not Gary; he knew too much about me and I wasn’t up to facing that this morning—and went to work, my nose mashed against the window. I missed Petite. I wanted to be cozy and safe, driving her instead of taking a cab. I had a better relationship with my car than I had with most people.
With any people, a small and somewhat snide voice inside my head said. I told it to go away, paid the cabby, and stumped through the precinct building to find Billy.
Actually, I was looking for his desk, where I figured I could leave a note explaining my humiliating inability to find anything useful, and then run away before I had to confess my failure out loud. I’d come in early just to be sure I could pull that off.
Billy was earlier. He leaned on his elbow, big palm wrinkling the side of his face until his left eye had all but disappeared into the curves of flesh. He looked like he’d been up all night, which was not only possible, but likely. An attack of guilt grabbed me by the throat. I snuck back out of the precinct building and scurried down the street to the doughnut shop to get him a lemon-poppyseed muffin and an oversize mocha. His face actually lit up when I plopped them down on his desk several minutes later, which made me feel slightly less like a loser.
“You’re a goddess.” The side of his face was one big red mark from leaning on his hand too long. He unwrapped the muffin, took a slurp of coffee, and squinted up at me. “You didn’t get anything about the murders, did you.”
“Is it that obvious?” Back to Loserville.
“You look like a kicked puppy. But I’ll forgive you anything for the next five minutes, because you brought me the manna of heaven.”
“Damn.” I looked at the muffin, impressed. “I shoulda gotten me one of those things.”
Billy chuckled and sank back in his chair, its unoiled hinge drawing out a creak that slowly lifted every individual hair from my fingertips to my nape. I wrapped my hands around his coffee cup for a few seconds, trying to chase the chill away. He ate half the muffin in one bite, then nodded at his computer screen, speaking around crumbs. “I’d forgive you anyway. I found some stuff out. Not about our dead girls. They all had ID, by the way. We’re seeing if they’ve got anything in common, but so far they look random. Anyway, the murders.”
Somehow I was able to understand every word he said. I usually couldn’t understand most of what I said when my mouth was full. I twisted around to look at the computer screen. “Interpol?”
“Thought of it this morning. I remembered reading about some kind of ritual murders about thirty years ago—”
“You read them thirty years ago?” Billy wasn’t more than ten years older than I was. He gave me a look that suggested I shut up. I pressed my lips together and widened my eyes, all innocence.
“The murders were about thirty years ago. I read about them a few years ago. Pedant.”
“Because you what, read about ritual murders for fun?”
“Joanie,” Billy said, annoyed. I lifted my hands in apology and tried to keep quiet. Billy glared at me until he was sure I wasn’t going to interrupt again, then continued. “These women all had their intestines stretched out, connecting them with one another.”
I suddenly wished I hadn’t drunk a lot of acidic coffee for breakfast, and looked around for something neutral to eat. There was nothing handy except Billy’s muffin, the second half of which he stuffed in his mouth, clearly suspecting that I was about to raid it. A burp rose up through the soured coffee in my stomach and I clamped my hand over my mouth, tasting coffee-flavored bile. Yuck.
“You’ve got a soft heart, Joanie.” Billy gave me a very tiny smile that did a lot to make me feel better.
“I’m not a homicide detective.”
“Mmm. Yeah. Anyway, so I remembered this morning reading about a murder like that over in Europe. It’s not the kind of thing the authorities like to noise around.”
“No kidding.” My stomach was still bubbling with ook. “So we’ve got a copycat?”
“Either that or somebody’s changed his hunting grounds. Anyway, the only case there was an eyewitness for was, like I said, about thirty years ago. A woman who was presumably supposed to be the last victim—there’s never more than four—fought back and managed to escape. The Garda Síochána—”