"I have to admit that I'm baffled," Father Thomas said. "Although it's academically interesting that the name Barbara means 'stranger."
"I just wanted to know if you had any theories. Doesn't matter how wild they are. I'm investigating the Maitland homicide and the Drewry homicide, and as you've probably seen on the news, we don't have a single credible eyewitness and we don't have any evidence whatsoever. I mean, not
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even a single fiber, or a speck of saliva, or a microscopic sample of dirt. There's so much nothing that it's unreal.
"We had exactly the same dearth of evidence when Cathy was killed, and I've been trying to figure out if there's any kind of connection."
Father Thomas picked a lemon slice out of his tumbler and thoughtfully sucked it. "Sour," he said, when he caught the expression on Decker's face. "For some reason, I've always liked sour. Mortification of the palate, I suppose."
"So . . . you don't have any ideas?"
"Not really, Lieutenant. But I've always been a strong believer in the divine messages that are brought to us in dreams. They may not make a whole lot of sense to us at first, but when we think back on them later, they can often give us striking insights into what is really happening to us. Sometimes I think that we're much more in touch with the meaning of our existence when we're asleep than we are when we're supposedly awake."
He leaned forward and said, very quietly, as if he were imparting the greatest secret in the universe, "Let me put it this way . . . if you were God, and you wanted to talk to your dearest creations, when would you choose to do it? By day, when their minds were filled with noise and work and family and worry? Or by night, when everything is quiet, and your words could be heard in all their perception and their clarity? And their strangeness, too.
"I may well be wrong, but my feeling is that when you understand what that means, 'Saint Barbara wants her revenge,' then you will understand everything."
"Okay," Decker said. "But what am I supposed to think of this?"
He unbuttoned his shirt and tugged it sideways to expose his left shoulder. There was an angry blister about an inch
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above his collarbone, like a cigarette burn, and it was weeping.
"In my nightmare last night, in that brushfire, a hot spark fell on me. When I woke up, my T-shirt was burned, and so was my skin."
He held out his hands to show Father Thomas that they were crisscrossed in small red scratches. "I was fighting my way through a briar patch, and this is what happened. My feet are the same."
Father Thomas took hold of his hands and examined them closely. Then he looked up at Decker with his china-blue eyes and said, "If what you are telling me is true, this is very disturbing. When nightmares begin to cause physical harm, that is a sign that something truly terrible is about to happen."
"Father, I think it's already begun."
He was sitting with Hicks in the Third Street Diner when Beethoven summoned him on his cellphone. Da-da-da-DAH!
"Can't you change that?" Hicks complained. "Even Strauss hated Beethoven. Do you know what he said? He said, 'Beethoven is a shit.' He actually used those actual words."
"What would you prefer? 'The Camptown Races'?"
A woman's voice said, "Lieutenant Martin? This is Lily Messenger from forensics?" She had a way of lifting her words at the end of every sentence so they sounded like questions.
"Sure. How are you, Officer Messenger?"
"I'm good, thanks. I have the preliminary analysis from those fluid samples I took from your apartment yesterday evening?"
"That was quick."
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"You're right, the lettering on your wall was drawn in human blood? Type-A, Rh-negative?"
"I see. Right . . . I appreciate that." He put the cell phone back on the table and said, "Saint Barbara was written in blood."
"You're kidding me. You think somebody's trying to warn you off?"
"Warn me off what? And why? It's not like we're breathing down anybody's neck."
Hicks cut a pancake with the edge of his fork. "Maybe we need to go through this whole thing right from the beginning again. Search the crime scenes again, reinterview the neighbors and the passersby. Like you say, nobody can go through life without leaving some evidence behind them. We've just missed seeing it, that's all."
Decker shook his head, unconvinced. "How's it going with the military memorabilia stores?"
"Only one more to check out, Wippler's Sutlery on Fifth Street, and one online."
Decker took one more bite of donut, grimaced, and dropped it back on his plate. "Let's try looking at this thing another way. We don't have any evidence, okay? But what else don't we have? We don't have motive. Alison Maitland was a very popular person and so was Major Drewry. All right, he was supposed to have been a bit of a grouch. But you don't normally disembowel people just because they complain about dogs messing on their front lawn.
"Whatever the captain thinks, I don't believe that two perpetrators could both be able to enter a house completely unseen and leave no forensic evidence whatsoever. I mean, that took some kind of skill that's practically supernatural. So we only have one perpetrator and we have to work out why this one perpetrator wanted to kill both Alison Maitland and George Drewry. They don't appear to have had
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anything in common. Different age, different sex, different background, different religion. But there must be something that connects them."
Hicks wiped his mouth with his napkin and crumpled it up. "How about we check up on their personal histories, as far back as we can go?"
"Well . . . it'll make us look as if we're doing something, if nothing else."
As they paid the check, Hicks suddenly said, "Did we pick up anything off that 911 call? I meant to ask you."
Decker shook his head. "Nothing conclusive. Jimmy reckons there was some kind of electronic glitch, that's all, but he's still working on it." What else was he going to say? That the screaming that had interrupted Alison Maitland's cries for help were the very same screams that he was hearing in his nightmares?
They stepped out into the street. Hicks said, "You know that invitation to go out for a Mexican meal? Does that still stand?"
"Of course it does. How about Wednesday?"
"The thing is . . . I don't know . . . Rhoda doesn't seem to have settled down here at all."
"Give her some time, sport. She'll get used to it."
"She says that Richmond gives her a bad feeling, she doesn't know why."
"I told you, she's probably missing her friends. Don't worry, we'll find her some new ones."
"Well, I hope so. We had a pretty bad fight last night, and we never used to fight."
Decker put on his sunglasses. "She wants attention, Hicks, that's all. All women need attention." To prove his point, he grinned at a ponytailed blonde in a red baseball cap. The blonde turned to smile back at him and almost collided with a streetlight.
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* * *
Back at the office, his answering machine was flashing. Somebody had called him only two minutes ago. He pressed the play button, and there was some crackling and shuffling before he heard "Lieutenant Martin? This is Eunice Plummer. I thought you ought to know that Sandra's seen him again. The So-Scary Man."
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He called back immediately. "Ms. Plummer? Yes, thanks for your message. When was this?"
"Only about fifteen minutes ago. We were walking along Marshall Street window-shopping when Sandra saw him walking toward us."