It was nearly one by then, and he was tired and hungry. He gave up the hunt and headed home. Later he’d call Angela, and if Pierce had returned he’d arrange to meet him somewhere. Just the two of them, alone, with the Colt Woodsman in his pocket as backup.
Cassie was home from church and a lunch date afterward; he parked beside her van in the driveway. As soon as he shut off the engine he could hear Fritz barking his fool head off inside the house. Terrific. While Angela was in Utah, Cassie had worked with the Doberman to control his high-strung nature, the worst part of which was incessant barking. Mostly, now, the dog stayed quiet when they were home or arriving home. Something must have set him off.
Fritz wasn’t confined to his usual place on the back porch; Hollis could hear him moving around and making his racket on the other side of the front door. He said loudly, “Shut up, boy, it’s me,” as he opened it. The Doberman backed off to let him enter the hallway, but then stood quivering with hackles up, a low growl in place of the barks. Hollis frowned. “What’s the matter with you? You forget who puts the Alpo in your food dish?” He spoke the words in a quiet voice, but the dog kept right on growling.
“Cass?” he called. “What’s got Fritz so stirred up?”
No answer.
The muscles in his back and neck began a slow bunching. He called her name again, louder, and again there was no response. He sidled past the Doberman, went ahead into the living room.
And stopped dead, slam-frozen with shock.
The room was a shambles.
Worse than that... it had been systematically, brutally raped.
The fabric on the couches and chairs had been slashed by some sharp object, with such viciousness that there was little left except strips like flayed flesh. Stuffing bulged through the wounds in his armchair, gouts of it like white-and black-streaked blood. End tables were overturned, Cassie’s glass-fronted curio cabinet toppled and shattered, the glass top of the coffee table smashed, bar stools savaged and tossed aside, bottles broken on the floor behind the wet bar. And over everything, the furniture and the carpet and the walls, a mad pattern of stripes and swirls of shiny black spray paint. Now that he was in here he could smell both the paint and the spilled liquor. The odors closed his throat, intensified the sudden blood-throb in his temples.
Cassie was there in the midst of the wreckage, slumped against a torn couch armrest. She stared straight ahead, not moving in any way; in profile her face had the splotchy white consistency of buttermilk. One arm was raised in front of her, the fingers extended, and he realized she was pointing.
The wall on the far side of the fireplace. A once-beige wall decorated with two watercolors by local artists, now defaced by the black paint. But the marks there were not meaningless like the rest; they formed crude letters a foot high—
18
He picked his way across the room, trying to avoid the still-sticky paint, to Cassie’s side. Except for lowering her arm, she remained immobile; did not look at him when he bent to grip her shoulders. Her eyes had a moist, glassy shine. Her body seemed to have no softness or resiliency, as if he were touching petrified wood. He tried to turn her against him, but she wouldn’t yield — not resisting, just not responding.
“Cass? You all right?”
“I haven’t been home long,” she said, as if she were answering a different question. “Fritz was barking. I went out to the porch to quiet him, but he broke away and came running in here.”
“The rest of the house...”
“I don’t know. This... I couldn’t...”
“I’ll check. You stay here.”
“It’ll never be the same again,” she said as he released her and straightened up. “No matter what we do. Never the same again.”
His gaze went again to the spray-painted wall. Rage boiled to the surface, came spilling out before he could stop it. “That son of a bitch. He’ll pay for this. I’ll make him sorry he was ever born.”
Now she was looking at him, with a kind of laser intensity. “Rakubian,” she said.
He didn’t answer. He stepped away from her, around behind the couch and along the inside wall into the hallway. Fritz was still there, no longer growling, but the muscled body still quivering. Hollis sidestepped him and went upstairs first to look into the master bedroom, then Angela’s and Eric’s old rooms. None of them had been violated. Downstairs again, he checked the dining room, TV room, his study, the kitchen. Intact, untouched. The Doberman followed him here, toenails clicking loudly on the hardwood floor.
All that barking, he thought. Scared Pierce off before he could do any more damage. Unless the living room was his only intended target. Tear it apart, leave his goddamn message, get out quick. The whole thing could have been done in less than ten minutes. Destroy an entire room... less than ten minutes.
The side kitchen window was open a few inches. Left that way after breakfast, carelessly, or left unlatched — Pierce could have gotten in through there. Or he could have come in through the front door. Hollis was sure he’d locked it when he left, but Pierce could have taken Angela’s key without her knowing it, walked right up, let himself in.
He quit the house by the patio door, went around to the front and into the Archers’ yard. There was no answer when he rang their bell. The Lippmans, their neighbors on the north, weren’t home, either. He crossed the street to the Changs’. They were in, but they had nothing to tell him; they’d been working in their backyard all morning.
Well, it didn’t really matter, did it? Pierce... who else but Pierce? And he couldn’t go to the police anyway. On the way back he had a strong impulse to get into the car, go hunting again. He fought it off. The state he was in now, it would be foolish, even dangerous, to brace Pierce.
Cassie was still in the living room, but she had gotten over the worst of her shock. She stood by the wet bar, color in her cheeks again, sparking anger in place of the glassy shine in her eyes.
She asked, “Did anybody see him?”
“No. Archers and Lippmans aren’t home.”
“He’s lucky as well as crazy. The police... maybe they can find something in this mess to prove it was him.”
“You didn’t phone them?”
“No, I was waiting for you.”
He took a breath before he said, “I’m not going to report this.”
“Why not? Rakubian—”
“Rakubian didn’t do it.”
“Of course he did.”
Another breath, and then the big plunge because he could not hide the truth any longer. “Rakubian’s dead, Cass.”
“Dead? You... dead?”
“For two months.”
“How do you know that? My God, you didn’t...”
“No, I didn’t kill him. But I have a pretty good idea who did. The same person who sent those notes, who did this.”
She was staring at him as if she had never seen him before. “Who?”
“I’d better tell you the whole story first.”
“Yes, you’d damn well better.”
“Not in here. In the kitchen.”
She led him out there, sat down at the dinette table, and waited for him to do the same before she said, “All right, Jack. The whole story.”
He told her. The truth and nothing but the truth, withholding only what he’d kept from Eric. She reacted just twice, first with a pained grimace when he explained his belief in Eric’s quilt, then with a jerky nod when he said of his cover-up, “I had to do it to protect him.” Otherwise she sat and listened and stared at him in stoic silence.