“Yes. She already knows that Rakubian is missing. What worries my wife and me is that he found out she was relocating and dropped out of sight to hunt for her.”
“How would he’ve found out?”
“I can’t answer that. I sure as hell didn’t say anything to tip him off. But he’s a shrewd bugger and he has plenty of contacts. For all we know he hired somebody to watch her. I doubt anyone could’ve followed her when she left on Monday, but how can we be absolutely sure?”
“I’ll want to talk to your daughter,” Macatee said. “Appreciate it if you’d get word to her, have her contact me as soon as possible.”
“You won’t try to force her to tell you her whereabouts? Or to come back here?”
“Not without good cause.”
“All right. I’ll e-mail your name and number to her.”
Macatee asked a few more questions, none of them, as far as Hollis could tell, motivated by anything other than routine. He said he and Angela would both be in touch and rang off.
End of round one. A draw, he thought — the best he could have hoped for.
Friday Afternoon
Stan Otaki called with the results of his PSA blood test. “The good news,” he said, “is that the cancer hasn’t spread outside your prostate.”
He clung to that for a few seconds. Then he asked, “What’s the bad news?”
“The growth rate is definitely accelerating. My advice, like it or not, is a ‘first cut’ to remove and test the lymph nodes surrounding the gland.”
“Surgery. I won’t do it, Stan.”
Otaki made a breathy, rumbling noise. “So be it. Then I suggest we begin radiation therapy right away.”
“No argument there.”
“I’ll make the arrangements.”
“And meanwhile,” Hollis said, “what should I do? Start putting my affairs in order, just in case?”
“Don’t make light of this, Jack.”
“I’m not. Just trying to keep a smiley face.”
“A positive attitude is important. We’ve discussed that.”
“I haven’t forgotten. My attitude’s positive,” he said, and he meant it. “I’m going to beat this thing, one way or another.”
“That’s the spirit.”
After all, he thought, this malignancy can’t be any worse than the one I buried on Saturday night.
Friday Evening
Cassie sat quiet when he finished telling her, no show of emotion of any kind. He thought her eyes were moist, but he couldn’t be sure in the lamplit living room.
After a time he said, “You knew, didn’t you.”
“That it’s been getting worse? Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You’ve had enough on your mind without me nagging you about the cancer. I knew you’d see Stan eventually — talk to me when you were ready. You’re stubborn and foolish sometimes, but you’ve always been a fighter. You’d never give in to a life-threatening disease.”
“No way.”
“So it’s radiation, then.”
He nodded. “You won’t try to talk me into having surgery?”
“Would it do any good?”
“You know how I feel. I couldn’t stand to go through an operation. I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”
“Then I won’t say a word. But I want you to do one thing for me in return.”
“If I can.”
“Don’t lie to me anymore. Don’t evade the truth, or stretch it, or hide behind it. We’re a team, remember? Don’t fight me anymore.”
“I won’t,” he said. And he wouldn’t, where the cancer was concerned. Eric and Rakubian were another matter. Hiding that truth was a necessity — an act of mercy, an act of love.
Monday Afternoon
Napoleon Macatee drove up from the city to examine the evidence of Rakubian’s stalking. Hollis and Cassie met him at the house at two o’clock. He was a black man in his fifties, stocky and solid as a barrel, with eyes like brown wounds. Those eyes had seen a great deal and would never be surprised or shocked by anything again. At once the eyes of a cynic and a martyr.
He seemed forthcoming enough when Hollis asked if there were any new developments. The short answer, he said, was no. He’d spoken to Angela twice (as they had; she’d called after her first talk with Macatee, again a few days later). He’d spoken to Eric, a fact he mentioned briefly and without a hint of suspicion. He’d spoken to dozens of Rakubian’s neighbors, business associates, and individuals who might have cause to do him harm. No leads so far. Nothing to indicate accident, voluntary disappearance, or foul play.
Cassie said, “It doesn’t seem possible he could have vanished without any trace.”
“Happens more often than you might think,” Macatee said. “Fifty thousand disappearances in this country every year. Men, women, children. Across the board when it comes to social and financial status, race, religion, age. Known reasons, too. David Rakubian’s case isn’t so unusual.”
“How likely is it he’ll be found?”
“Depends. If it was voluntary and he covered his tracks well enough, odds are he’ll stay lost unless he decides to resurface on his own. If he was a victim of violence, evidence of it may turn up sooner or later. It’s not as easy to dispose of a dead body as people think.”
Not unless you’re very, very lucky.
They showed Macatee the evidence box, the dossier Hollis had brought home from the office. He sifted through the letters, cards, poems, time logs; listened to two tapes at random. Hollis watched him closely the entire time. Macatee’s expression remained neutral, but there seemed to be compassion in the brown-wound eyes when he looked at Cassie. He asked if he could take the dossier and several other items along with him, wrote out a receipt, thanked them for their cooperation, and left them alone. The interview had lasted little more than an hour.
Hollis was convinced that if Macatee had any suspicions, they were without any real basis. Fishing in the dark. Perhaps even doing no more than going through the motions. The dossier, the tapes and letters, confirmed what a sick bastard Rakubian had been. Could a cop who’d seen all sorts of human misery honestly care what happened to a wife abuser and stalker, as long as he stayed missing? Hollis didn’t see how. The inspector had struck him as a good man; if anything, he had to be on their side.
Monday Night
He had the dream for the first time that night. There had been others in the past nine days, disturbing but vague and jumbled, and he recalled little of them afterward. This one was vivid, murky in background but sharp in every detail, as if it were a terror-laced memory or precognition.
He was walking in a formless place of shapes and shadows. Wary but not frightened. Ahead he saw a wall, and as he neared it an opening appeared. He walked through the opening and found himself in a cave with wooden walls and a concrete floor. He stood looking down at the floor’s smooth black surface. And as he looked, cracks began to form there, to lengthen and widen, and the fear came in a rush as the concrete crumbled. A hand reached up through one of the cracks, fingers clawing toward him, then the entire arm, a shoulder, a head — Rakubian’s shattered head, Rakubian’s face grinning in a savage rictus. Then, like a bloody monolith, dripping dirt and fragments of rotting skin, all of the dead man rose up out of the broken floor and started toward him, whispering his name. He tried to run, stood rooted, and the clawed fingers closed bonily around his throat—
He jerked awake damp and shaking, his breathing clogged. Only a dream, a nightmare, but it remained hot and clear in his mind. He could still see Rakubian’s face, the death’s-head grin, the bulging eyes; still feel the pressure of those skeletal fingers. His throat ached as if the strangulation had been real.