“What’s keeping those eyes, Colm?”
A shriek came from atop the basement’s shelving, shooting splinters of fear up my spine. A skittering sound followed.
“Bugler, what was that?” cried Mother.
“Daddy, we got rats!” Becky whimpered, her brown eyes pooling with tears.
“That ain’t no rat,” Father grinned.
A second shriek, more bone piercing than the first, discombobulated me. The box leaped out of my hands, launching the agate eyes into their own frenzied trajectories. My father’s face went through a transformation. The muscles of his jaw knotted. A furrow cut deep into his forehead.
“Now look what you’ve done!”
He stood up. My heart burst.
His face became warlike. He let loose a cry, unfathomable and archaic, like the howl of a Celtic warrior.
My sister and I watched in horror. I knew my life hung on his very breath. He could choke me with his brute hands or spare my life.
He ground the strewn eyes under the heel of his hiking boot, leaned his distorted face into mine, and said, “I could snuff you out, son. And it wouldn’t matter much to the sun or the moon or the stars.”
The sound of a blaring siren jarred Colm’s consciousness to the present. A homeless woman pushing a Key Food shopping cart had collided with a Volvo, activating its alarm.
In a flash, he refocused on the task at hand. That afternoon he had followed the housewife as she drove that Volvo from the Kings Plaza Shopping Mall to this dimly lit parking lot outside Ralph Avenue’s retail strip.
Her sole purpose for going to the mall was to meet with him for the first time. Colm took pleasure in knowing he had stood her up. But what thrilled him more was that she had now become his quarry.
Seated behind the wheel of his van, he watched as she dashed out of the video store toward the Volvo. She got to her car and depressed the panic button, killing the siren.
Colm stared at the stiletto heels she had donned for their first encounter, at her meaty fingers clutching the rented tape. Inside his parka, he touched the rag soaked in Halothane. The homeless woman drifted from sight. His target was now alone in the deserted parking lot.
He struck.
As he dragged the housewife’s body to the sliding door of his van, his gaze fell upon the videotape she had dropped on the parking lot’s asphalt. He picked it up.
It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.
That was a flick she’d never see again.
He’d watch it for her.
Chapter 2
Colm spilled a tube of Max Factor Burnt Umber lipstick, a Lancome compact, and a Tampax tampon from her pocketbook onto the meat-cutting block in his basement’s kitchen, in what Colm liked to call the operatory. The room was fitted with all the gadgetry needed for his murderous spree, and was dingy in comparison to the grandeur of the rest of the mansion.
He sniffed the tube of lipstick and the compact, and lingered on the virgin tampon. Her scent enveloped them all.
She was sitting before him, duct tape sealing her mouth and binding her arms and legs to the chair. She reeked of fear, but Colm saw only the terror in her eyes.
“I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to finally meet you,” he said, pulling up a chair. “The personal touch is lost when corresponding over the Internet. It did permit me to gather volumes of information about you, but in exchange you learned nothing about me. That’s not fair. Wouldn’t you agree? I can’t tell you why, but it’s important to me that you go to your grave knowing who it was that sent you there.”
The woman’s eyes widened. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Colm continued.
“My name is Colm Pierce. Although my birth name was O’Dwyer. My adoptive parents, the Pierces, thought my name should be changed. Wonderful parents, the Pierces.
“Please forgive me if I’m boring you. I just thought you should know my name. Oh, and by the way, although I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few years, you’re my first.”
He stood up. Behind his head five meat hooks dangled from a stone ceiling.
Gastric juices tumbled in the pit of her stomach. He imagined the taste of bile that surely coated her throat. Her breasts were swollen from the terror. Were her nipples sore?
He reached inside her purse and withdrew a leather wallet. In it were four plastic sleeves, suitable for photographs. Three of those sleeves contained snapshots of a little girl.
“I don’t rob cradles,” he muttered.
He slouched toward her.
She braced herself, expecting an assault.
There was none. Instead, he caressed her face and whispered her name.
“Deirdre.”
He walked to the stove and opened the oven door. Rubbing his fingers on its blackened walls, he returned to his captive, streaked her cheeks from ear to ear and encircled her eyes with soot.
“Don ghrian agus don ghealach agus do na realtoga,” he chanted in Old Irish. To the sun and the moon and the stars.
He left the room. When he returned, he was pushing a gurney. It held a tray of surgical instruments. Selecting the Bard-Parker scalpel, he turned to face his Deirdre.
She trembled as the skin of her neck welcomed the glimmering blade.
Chapter 3
The ambient air that hung above the cemetery was as cold as the bodies the graveyard encased. The sparrows that usually trumpeted their presence were elsewhere, seeking shelter from the rain that was about to fall. Only the lonesome cry of a cricket pierced the stillness.
Police Lieutenant John W. Driscoll, his face etched in grief, reached out his hand and let it fall on the grainy texture of his daughter’s granite tombstone. Tears moistened his eyelids.
“Good morning, my little one,” he breathed, eyeing the stone’s epitaph: “A Ray of Sunshine,” words that spoke the language of his heart.
He envisioned his daughter’s smile, and his lips responded in kind. “Daddy’s here,” he whispered.
In life, she had always known how to lighten his heart when all else failed him. And in return, he made sure that she was never darkened by memories like those of his own childhood at the hands of an alcoholic father and a despondently depressed mother. No, Nicole had never felt what he’d felt: like an orphan, shipwrecked.
It was six years since the accident that took the life of his daughter and nearly killed his wife. And in those six years, he had visited his daughter’s grave site religiously.
“I brought you a present,” he murmured, reaching inside his jacket pocket, from which he produced an Egyptian alabaster music box. He placed it on the cold stone and lifted its lid. The first few notes of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major rang in the stillness of the graveyard.
“This is for your collection,” he said.
His cellular purred. “Driscoll here. When? Where? I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He genuflected on the lawn and leaned the music box against the tombstone.
“They need me,” he sighed, and kissed the stone.
Chapter 4
Driscoll guided his rain-swept Chevy along the meandering roadway that sliced through Prospect Park, then parked his cruiser alongside the yellow-and-black police tape that cordoned off the crime scene. He hated rain. He had promised his wife, Colette, that someday they would settle on an island with no clouds, discard his shield, collect his retirement pay, and never drift far from shore. His dream remained on hold.
He swept back his sandy hair and approached the abandoned boathouse where the remains of a woman had been discovered. He winced at the expression of dread on the face of the rookie cop who greeted him. The bottom of the officer’s trousers was stained, and the stench of vomit hung in the air.