Scrawled on the flap of the card in the same handwriting was the message:
Harriet was Harriet Byrnes, the lieutenant’s wile. Why in hell was she throwing a party for him in the squadroom? Was it Pete’s birthday? An anniversary? Twenty years on the force? Thirty? A hundred?
Hawes shrugged and wrote down the date and time in his appointment calendar.
* * * *
On Tuesday morning, December 20, the Deaf Man’s tenth message arrived.
They knew by now that the number of items pasted to each blank sheet of paper had nothing whatever to do with the order in which the messages were received. The eight black horses, for example, were on the very first message. The six police shields were on the fourth message. The eleven Colt Detective Specials were on the seventh message. And so on. And now on the tenth message:
The detectives tacked the sheet of paper to the bulletin board. There were now:
Two nightsticks. Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Seven wanted flyers. Eight black horses. Nine patrol cars. Ten D.D. forms. And eleven Detective Specials.
They still didn’t know what any of it meant.
Did he plan to stop at eleven?
Or would he go beyond that?
If he stopped at eleven, then the number one was still missing in the sequence.
The hell with it, they thought.
Christmas was only five days away.
* * * *
Bert Kling was looking through his mail when Eileen Burke let herself in with the key he had given her.
It was close to four-thirty in the afternoon, and the lights on the Calm’s Point Bridge—festooned for the holiday season and visible through his windows—were blinking red and green against the purple dusk. He sat under a floor lamp near the windows in an easy chair he’d bought in a thrift shop after his divorce. He had never discussed his divorce with Andy Parker. He had never discussed anything but police work with Parker, and even that rarely. He did not know Parker was himself divorced. He did not know that the two men might have shared common thoughts on the subject, did not know that Parker, like himself, thought of divorce as a kind of killing.
The holidays, even now and even with Eileen, were the most difficult time for Kling. Augusta would pop into his mind whenever he shopped the stores, even when he was shopping for Eileen. Well, the physical similarities, he supposed. In trying to settle on a color, he’d tell a store clerk that his girlfriend was a green-eyed redhead—describing Eileen, of course—and immediately Augusta would come to mind. Or in trying to remember what size Eileen wore, he’d say she was five feet nine inches tall, and immediately the image of Augusta would come again, unbidden, ghostlike, Augusta as he’d first seen her when he was investigating a burglary in her apartment...
Long red hair and green eyes and a deep suntan. Dark green sweater, short brown skirt, brown boots. High cheekbones, eyes slanting up from them, fiercely green against the tan, tilted nose gently drawing the upper lip away from partially exposed, even white teeth. Sweater swelling over breasts firm without a bra, the wool cinched tightly at her waist with a brown brass-studded belt, hip softly carving an arc against the nubby sofa back, skirt revealing a secret thigh as she turned more fully toward him…
Augusta.
‘Hi,’ Eileen said, and came to where he was sitting.
She kissed him on top of the head. Red and green lights from the bridge blinked into the red and green of her hair and her eyes.
‘You look like Christmas,’ he said.
‘I do, huh?’ she said. ‘I feel like Halloween. When did you get in? I called a little while ago.’
‘A little after four,’ he said. ‘I was doing some shopping. What’d the doctor say?’
‘He said time heals all wounds.’
She took off her coat, tossed it familiarly onto the bed, sat on the edge of the bed, eased off her high-heeled shoes, and reached down to massage one foot. Long legs, sleek and clean, full-calved and tapering to slender ankles. Eileen. Augusta. The knifing would have destroyed Augusta. She was a model, her face was her fortune. Eileen was only a cop. But she was a woman. And a beautiful woman. And she’d been cut on her face. The knifing had occured on October 21, two months ago. At the hospital they’d taken twelve stitches. The scar was still livid on her left cheek.
‘He said I might not need plastic surgery at all,’ Eileen said. ‘Told me the hospital emergency room did a very good job. He said the scar may look awful now...’
‘It doesn’t really look bad at all,’ Kling said.
‘Yeah, bullshit,’ Eileen said. ‘But it’ll heal as a thin white line, he said, if I can live with that. He said it all depends on my “acceptance level.” How do you like that for a euphemism?’
‘When do you have to see him again?’ Kling asked.
‘Next month. He says I shouldn’t even be thinking about plastic surgery just yet. He said the cut should be entirely healed within six months to a year, and I should wait till then to see how I feel. That’s what he means by acceptance level, I guess. How much vanity I have. How ugly I’d care to look for the rest of my life.’
‘You don’t look ugly,’ Kling said. ‘You couldn’t possibly look...’
‘I’m not winning any beauty contests these days, that’s for sure,’ Eileen said. ‘You think there are any rapists out there who dig scars? Think they’d go for a decoy with a slashed left cheek?’
‘I kind of like the look it gives you,’ he said, trying to joke her out of her dark mood. ‘Makes you look sort of dangerous.’
‘Yeah, dangerous,’ she said.
‘Devil-may-care. Like a lady pirate.’
‘Like a three-hundred-pound armed robber,’ Eileen said. ‘All I need is a tattoo on my arm. Mom in a heart.’
‘You feel like Chinese tonight?’ he asked.
‘I feel like curling up in bed and sleeping for a month. Going to see him is exhausting. He’s always so fucking consoling, do you know what I mean? It isn’t his fucking face, so he thinks...’
‘Hey,’ Kling said softly.
She looked up at him.
‘Come on,’ he said, and went to her. He kissed the top of her head. He cupped his hand under her chin and kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose. He kissed the scar. Gently, tenderly.
‘Kissing it won’t make it go away, Bert,’ she said, and paused. ‘I hope you didn’t buy me anything too feminine for Christmas.’
‘What?’
I don’t feel pretty,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want any gifts that...’
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘And feminine. And sexy. And...’