Detective Kunzel laid his hand on Sissy’s shoulder. “Thanks for trying to help, anyhow. I just wish that more of the good people of Cincinnati were as concerned about helping us to catch criminals as you are.”
“There’s one more thing, Detective,” said Sissy.
“Hey, call me Mike, please.”
“Red Mask wants notoriety. He’s probably seen himself on the TV news already, and in the papers. He’s going to be in touch with you, personally. He’s going to start giving you advance notice of what he’s going to do next. He wants to start his own personal reign of terror.”
“All I can say is, he knows my number.”
At that moment, Molly came out of Mr. Kraussman’s office with her sketch pad. Without saying a word, she folded it back and showed them her drawing.
Detective Bellman whistled. “Same guy. Never saw two composites look so much alike.”
The sketch depicted a red-faced man with bristling hair and a sloping forehead, glaring out of the narrow space between two elevator doors. He had sharp, angular cheekbones and a prominent chin with a sharp cleft in it. The only difference between this sketch and the sketch that Molly had drawn from Jane Becker’s description was that his eyes appeared to glitter, as if he were feeling triumphant.
“Right,” said Detective Kunzel. “Good job, Molly. Why don’t you take that over to headquarters and have them send it out to the media?”
Morgan Freeman’s cousin came rustling up to them in his blue Tyvek suit. “Got you some footprints this time, Detective.”
“Any idea what size?”
“Ten, I’d say. Very broad foot. But the soles didn’t have no pattern on them, nothing at all. Not even stitching.”
Detective Bellman said, “Any footprint is better than no footprint. That first stabbing, there was all this blood on the floor, and the perpetrator didn’t leave a single footprint, nowhere.”
“Correction,” said Morgan Freeman’s cousin. “He may have left a footprint, but we were unable to tell if he did or not. Half of the office staff trampled in and out of that elevator, followed by half of the homicide unit. By the time they were through, the whole place looked like one of those Arthur Murray dance lessons.”
“Bernard here is very hot on crime-scene integrity,” said Detective Bellman.
Molly said to Sissy, “Are you coming to police headquarters with me, or would you rather go back home? I shouldn’t be longer than an hour.”
“I’ll go home,” said Sissy. “Victoria will be back at three thirty, won’t she? I can give her some milk and cookies.”
“Trevor can do that. He can’t cook, but he can pour milk and take cookies out of the cookie jar.”
“I’d still like to be there,” Sissy told her. Just to make sure that she’s safe. She still didn’t understand the significance of the girl in the white nightgown, floating on the ocean, and the headless fish bleeding in the water, and they worried her.
“I’ll have an officer take you home,” said Detective Kunzel, and beckoned to one of the uniforms standing by the main doors.
We’re here, somebody whispered, very close to Sissy’s right ear.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dying in the Dark
“What?” she said, turning around. But there was nobody within twenty feet of her.
“Please?” said Detective Kunzel.
“I distinctly heard somebody speak. A woman, I think. She said, ‘We’re here.’ ”
“An echo, I guess. You go with this officer and he’ll take good care of you.”
Don’t leave us. We’re here.
Sissy lifted one hand and said, “Ssh! There she was again! She just said, ‘Don’t leave us.’ ”
Detective Kunzel looked around. “There’s no woman here, Mrs. Sawyer. I think your ears are playing tricks on you.”
But Sissy could sense the woman now. She could almost feel her breath against the side of her neck. The woman was black, and she was middle-aged, and she wore upswept eyeglasses. Her name began with an M or an N.
And she was here.
Sissy began to circle around the lobby, her hand still lifted, listening.
Don’t leave us. For pity’s sake, please don’t leave us.
Molly said, “Sissy, what is it? Are you okay?”
“She’s very close,” said Sissy, distractedly. “She’s trying to tell me where she is.”
There was a sharp clatter as two crime-scene investigators adjusted the tripods that supported their floodlights. Sissy said, “Ssh!” and Detective Bellman called out, “Hey, people! Can we have a little quiet in here for a moment?”
We’re here, the woman whispered.
“Where?” Sissy coaxed her.
Please don’t leave us. It’s dark and it’s cold and I can’t see nothing. The others I think they both dead, Ronnie and Lindy, or else they real close to it.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Sissy asked her. Detective Kunzel looked at Molly and raised his left eyebrow.
Mary. Mary Clay.
“Well, you just hang on there, Mary, because I can hear you and I’m going to find you.”
“Mary?” said Detective Kunzel. “Who the hell is Mary?”
“What’s the last thing you remember, Mary?”
We is all finished up cleaning on the twenty-second floor. We is waiting to go up to Mr. Radcliffe’s. The doors opened up. “I didn’t know this one was working,” says Ronnie.
“The elevator. you’re talking about the elevator?”
Detective Kunzel turned to Molly. “Does she always talk to herself like this?”
But Molly said, “Ssh. I’ve seen her do this before. Whoever she’s talking to, she can hear them and they can hear her, even if we can’t. Astral conversation, that’s what she calls it.”
“You mean like Patricia Arquette, in Medium? Talking to dead people, and people who aren’t even there?”
“Well, something like that. More like broadband, only psychic.”
Sissy stopped circling around now and stayed where she was, in the center of the lobby. “You’re close, Mary, I can feel you.”
Lindy says it looks like it’s working now. So in we step and the doors close.
“What then, Mary?”
Elevator gives a kind of a bang and it scares the daylights out of us. Now it starts to move, but jerky. And it ain’t going up like we want it to. It’s going down. And now there’s another bang, and it’s stopped. Why’s it stopped? Don’t tell me we’re going to be trapped in here. I can’t stand being all closed in like this. I even get the claustrophobia when the church is crowded, and I have to step outside and take in some air.
Mary was breathing hard now, and her voice began to rise in panic.
The doors is opening up. Which floor we on? I don’t know which floor we on. But we don’t even get a chance because he comes rushing in like a mad person and he’s stabbing at us with two big knives and Ronnie drops down to his knees with blood spraying out of his neck and Lindy falls backward and then he’s stabbing at me and I can feel the knives chopping into my shoulders and into my arms and then it’s all black.
Sissy closed her eyes again. She could sense that Mary was very badly hurt, and that she was dying. That was the reason she could hear her. Her spirit was already leaving her — floating away from her material body in skeins of light.
“Mary?” she said. “Mary, can you hear me?”
Please come find us, Mary whispered. Don’t let me die in the dark. My kids. My mother.