I poured barbecue sauce over the chipping hammer, especially on the coiled handle, and dropped it and rolled it on a white pillow case. The striping was unmistakable. I pounded chicken breasts with both ends of that ominous black iron tool and recognized the punched-out shapes right away. I called Marino..He wasn't home. I paged him. He didn't get back to me for fifteen minutes. By then my nerves were shorting out.
"Sorry," he said. 'The battery went dead in my phone, had to find a pay phone."
"Where are you?"
"Driving around. We got the state police fixed-wing plane circling the river, probing everything with a search: light. Maybe the bastard's eyes glow in the dark like a dog. You seen the sky? Goddamn, they're suddenly saying we might get six inches of snow. It's already started."
"Marino, Bray was killed with a chipping hammer," I said.
"What the hell is that?"
"Used in masonry. You aware of any construction along the river that might involve stone, brick or something like that? On the off chance he got the tool from there because he's staying there?".
"Where did you find a chipping hammer? I thought you was going home? I hate it when you do shit like this."
"I am home," I impatiently said. "And maybe he is, too, right this minute. Maybe it's some place putting in pavers or a wall."
Marino paused.
"I wonder if you use something like that on a slate roof," he said. "Fhere's this big old house behind gates, way back from Windsor Farms, right on the river. They're putting on a new slate roof."
"Is anybody living there?'
I didn't think anything about it, since construction guys are crawling around it all day long. Nobody's in it. It's for sale," he said.
"He could be inside during the day and come out after dark when the crew is gone," I replied. "Maybe the alarm isn't on for fear the construction noise would set it off."
"1'm on my way."
"Marino, please don't go there alone."
"ATF's got people all over the place," he said.
I built a fire and when I went out for more wood, it was snowing hard, the moon a faint face behind low clouds. I cradled split logs in one arm and tightly gripped my Glock in my hand as I kept my eye on every shadow and tuned my ear to every sound. The night seemed to bristle with fear. I hurried inside my house and reset the alarm.
I sat in the great room, flames lashing the sooty throat уf the chimney, and I worked on sketches. I tried to reconstruct how the killer might have gotten Bray back to the bedroom without inflicting a single blow. Despite her years in administration, she was a trained police officer. How did he incapacitate her seemingly so easily without apparent injury or a struggle? My television. was on, and every half hour or so the local networks had news breaks.
The so-called Loup-Garou couldn't have been pleased about what was being said, assuming he had access to a radio or television.
"… been described as stocky, maybe six feet tall, maybe bald. According to the chief medical examiner, Dr. Scarpetta, he may have a rare disease that causes excess hairiness and a deformed face and teeth..:'
Thanks a lot, Harris, I thought. He had to pin all that on me.
"… are urged to exercise extreme care. Don't answer the door until you're sure who it is."
Harris was right about one thing, though. People were going to panic. My phone rang at almost ten.
"Hey," Lucy said, and she sounded more cheerful than I'd heard her in a while.
"Are you still at MCV?" I asked.
"Closing up things here. You see the snow out there? It's coming down like a bitch. We should be home in about an hour."
"Drive carefully. Call me when you pull up so I can help get Jo inside."
I put two more logs on the fire, and no matter how secure my fortress was, I started to feel scared. I tried to distract myself by watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie on HBO while I paid bills. I thought of Talley and got depressed again, and I was angry with him. No matter my ambivalence, he hadn't really given me a chance. I had tried to get in touch with him, and he hadn't bothered to call back.
When the phone rang again, I jumped and a stack of bills fell off my lap.
"Yes?" I said.
"The son of a bitch's been staying there, all right," Marino exclaimed. "But he ain't there now. Trash, food wrappers, crap all over the place. And hairs in the damn bed. The sheets stink like a dirty, wet dog."
Electricity crackled up my veins.
"HIDTA's got a squad out somewhere, and I've got cops all over the place. He takes one dip in the river and we got his ass."
"Lucy's bringing Jo home, Marino," I said. "She's out there, too."
"You're by yourself?" he blurted out.
"Inside, locked up, alarm on, pistol on the table."
"Well, you stay right where you are, you hear me!"
"Don't worry."
"One good thing is, it's snowing really hard. About three inches already, and you know how snow lights up everything. Ain't a good time for him to be out wandering around."
I hung up and skipped from channel to channel, but nothing interested me. I got up and wandered into my office to check my e-mail.but didn't feel like answering any of it. I picked up the jar of formalin and held it up to the light, looking at those small yellow eyes that were really gold dots reduced in size, and I thought about how off-base I'd been about so much. I anguished over every slow step and every wrong turn I'd taken. Now two more women were dead.
I set the jar of formalin on the coffee table in the great room. At eleven I turned to NBC to watch the news. Of course, it was all about this evil man, this Loup-Garou. As I changed to another channel, I was shocked by my burglar alarm. The remote control fell to the floor as I jumped up and fled to the back of the house. My heart was coming out of my chest. I locked my bedroom door and grabbed my Glock, waiting for the phone to ring. Minutes later it did.
"Zone six, the garage door," I was told. "Do you want the police?"
"Yes! I want them now!" I said.
I sat on my bed and let the alarm beat my eardrums as it hammered and hammered. I kept an eye on the Aiphone monitor, and then remembered it would not work if the police didn't ring the bell. And, as I knew so well, they never did. I had no choice but to turn the alarm off and reset it and sit and wait in silence, straining so hard to hear every sound that I imagined I could hear the snow falling.
Barely ten minutes later, there was a sharp rapping on my front door and I hurried down the hallway as a voice on the porch loudly called'out "Police."
With great relief I placed my pistol on the dining-room table and said, "Who is it?"
I wanted to be sure.
"Police, ma'am. We're responding to your alarm."
I opened the door and the same two officers from several nights before knocked snow off their boots and came in.
"You've not been having a good time of it lately, have you?" Officer Butler said as she pulled off her gloves, her eyes moving around. "You might say we've taken a personal interest in you."
"Garage door this time," McElwayne, her partner, said. "Okay, let's take a look."
I followed them through the mud room and into _ the garage, and instantly knew this was no false alarm. The garage door had been pried up about six inches, and when we got down to look through the opening, we saw footprints in the snow leading to the door and then away from it. There were no apparent tool marks except for scrapes on the rubber strip at the bottom of the door. The footprints were lightly dusted with snow. They- had been left recently, and that was consistent with when the alarm had gone off, McElwayne got on the radio and requested a B amp;E detective, who showed up twenty minutes later and took photographs of the door and footprints and dusted for fingerprints. But once again, there really was nothing more the police could do other than follow the trail of footprints. It led along the edge of my yard and out to the street, where the snow was chopped up by tires.
"All we can do is step up patrol around here," Butler told me as they left. "We'll keep an eye on your house as best we can, and if anything else happens, call nine-one-one right away. Even if it's just a noise that bothers you, okay?"