“Obviously no one thought she had the strength or the ability, and that’s why when there was the scheduling foul-up. No one was really concerned. And that’s why no one even discovered she was gone until a nurse went in to give her a shot and found another nurse tied up naked in the closet. They figure she got herself at least a two-hour window.”
Savich shook himself. His brain was back in gear, finally. “All right. Where would she go? Do they have any leads?”
“Ollie says there are more cops looking for her than the hunt for Marlin and Erasmus Jones. Everyone knows she’s really scary, that she’s truly dangerous. No one wants her free again.” Sherlock cleared her throat. “There’s the question of those things you saw in the barn, Dillon-the Ghouls.”
He squeezed her again and said against her temple, her curly hair tickling his nose, “I know what I want to do right this minute. I want to talk to Sean and listen to him gurgle. That little guy is so sane, and that’s what we need right now, a big dose of normalcy.” He didn’t add that he just wanted to know for sure, all the way to his soul, that his little boy was all right. As for the Ghouls-if they were real, and Savich knew to his bones that they were-then it was possible there was more danger than anyone could begin to imagine. Would the FBI let all the people looking for Tammy Tuttle know that she could have accomplices? Or were they just going to ignore everything he’d told them?
They took turns gurgling with their son, who was busy gnawing a banana, not a graham cracker. Then they called Ollie back to see if there was any news yet.
“Yes,” Ollie Hamish said, “but not good.” Sherlock could see him leaning back in his chair, spinning it just a bit, because he was nervous and scared. “Tammy Tuttle just murdered a teenage boy a block outside of Chevy Chase, Maryland. She left a note on the body. Well, actually, she didn’t leave it on the body, she left it attached to the body. It’s addressed to you, Savich.”
“Read it, Ollie.”
“Here goes: ‘I’ll get you and I’ll rip your arm off and then I’ll cut your fucking head off, you murdering bastard. Then I’ll give you to the Ghouls.’ ”
“That’s real cheery,” Savich said. “Was it addressed specifically to me?”
“Yeah, which means she knows your name. How? Everyone thinks she probably heard people talking about you in the hospital. She left her fingerprints all over the paper and envelope, obviously didn’t care. Oh yes, at the murder scene, there was also a black-painted circle, and the boy was inside it. She’s loose, Savich. Everyone is shaken to their toes. It was a really gruesome crime scene. That poor kid, he was only thirteen years old.”
“Black-painted circle,” Savich said. “Tammy called to the Ghouls to come get the boys in the circle.”
“I was hoping maybe you really hadn’t seen anything, Savich, that maybe you’d just experienced a temporary vision distortion. Since the boy’s body was a mess, maybe more of a mess than a single one-armed sick woman could have done, then maybe these things-these Ghoul characters-were somehow involved. Jimmy Maitland brought it up. And the bosses even had a big meeting about it. They’ve all decided that what you saw in that barn were dust devils.”
Savich said finally, “Mr. Maitland has my number here if he wants to talk about it. Now, here’s something to do. Bring in Marilyn Warluski.”
“We already went looking. She’s long gone, no one knows where.”
“MAX found out that she has an ex-boyfriend in Bar Harbor, Maine, name of Tony Fallon. Check there. Just maybe she’ll be with him and know something. Tammy has to go somewhere, and Marilyn loaned her and her brother that barn for their use. Did Tammy steal any money?”
“Not at the hospital, but elsewhere? We haven’t heard of anything yet. Also, there have been a dozen reports of stolen vehicles. We’re checking all those out as well.”
“Okay. Find Marilyn and wring her out, Ollie. I think you should be the one in direct contact with her. You know more than the others.”
“Okay. Let me take a deep breath here. I’m very glad you aren’t listed in the phone book and your phone number’s private. It’s unlikely she could find you where you are, but I want you to be careful, Savich, really careful.”
“You can count on that, Ollie.”
“Okay. How are things going out there with Lily?”
Savich said, “She managed to hurt a guy who tried to kill her on an empty bus a couple of hours ago. Clark Hoyt in the new Eureka field office is checking all the hospitals. No word yet. Lily drew a picture of him and we just heard from a Lieutenant Dobbs at the Eureka Police Department that the guy’s a local hood-for-hire, a freelancer, who would kill his own mom for the right price. Name of Morrie Jones. Everyone’s looking for him. He’s a kid, just turned twenty.”
Savich could see Ollie shaking his head back and forth as he said, “Big troubles on both coasts. Ain’t nothing easy anywhere in this world, is there?”
• Lily slept for three hours-no nightmares, thank God-and awoke to see her brother seated on a big wing chair pulled near her lovely Victorian canopied bed, a gooseneck lamp beaming light over his right shoulder, reading through a sheaf of papers.
He looked up immediately.
“You’re fast. I just opened one eye and you knew I was awake.”
“Sean got both Sherlock and me trained in a matter of days. He yawns or grunts, and we’re ready to move.”
She managed a smile, but truth be told, the day’s events had caught up with her. She’d gone from being euphoric about drawing Remus again, to nearly being murdered, to getting back her paintings. At least she’d had a great Mexican lunch and it hadn’t made her sick to her stomach.
But now, even after a very long sleep, she still felt wrung out. Her side ached something fierce, and her head sat heavy and dull on her shoulders. “No, Dillon, don’t get up. What are you reading?”
“Articles and reports MAX found for me on weird phenomena. I’m trying to find other reported crimes with similarities to the Tuttles’ rampage and the Ghouls.”
“You told me just a little bit about the Tuttles and these Ghoul things, Dillon. Tell me more.”
“There were two of them, two distinct white cones that sometimes came together. You can imagine how the two boys-Tammy and Timmy Tuttle called them ‘Little Bloods’-were reacting. I’ve never seen such terror. I nearly swallowed my own tongue I was so afraid. Then Tammy Tuttle called to the Ghouls, yelled for them to bring their axes and knives, their ‘treats’ were ready for them. The boys wanted out of that circle and Tammy pulled her knife. She was going to nail them to the barn floor, inside that damned circle. That’s when I shot her, and the bullet nearly tore her arm off. Timmy pulled his gun then, but he wasn’t going to shoot me, no, he was aiming at the boys, so I had to kill him clean and quick, no choice. Then one of those white cones was coming at us, and I shot it. Did the bullet hurt it? I have no idea. I pulled the boys out of that circle and then both of the white cones just whooshed out of there. No one outside the barn saw them. So it was just the two boys, me, and Tammy, who had called them.”
“My God, that’s scary.”
“More than you can imagine.”
Lily said, “I wonder, did their victims have to be inside that circle?”
“Good question. Since I was there and saw all of it, I think they did have to have their victims inside the circle. Or maybe it was just a ritual that they themselves had developed over time, a ceremony that gave the Tuttles more of a kick out of what they were doing. However, I didn’t see that the Ghouls had any knives or axes, so why did they say that?” He paused a moment, thinking back. “You know, Tammy had a knife but I didn’t see any axes anywhere.”