She screams for help and Cain tackles her.
Down they tumble, grabbing at each other instinctively, turning over and over, again and again slammed against the ground, their mud-covered bodies picking up leaves and twigs and grass, their noses touching, his eye sockets rimmed with blood, his forehead a bloody valley, blood and mud soaking his forelocks.
At the bottom of the hill they come to a rest, broken and slashed and coughing plant matter. The dog’s barks race over the pasture, and a long shadow enfolds Asham.
Abel says, “You will be repaid for your wickedness.”
Cain wipes his mouth. The back of his hand comes away red. He spits. “You know nothing.”
“I know what I see.” Abel tosses down his crook. He kneels, scoops Asham into his arms, and starts to carry her away.
He has taken five steps when the crook splinters on the back of his skull.
The earth here is drier, thirstier, unforgiving as Asham falls and cracks her own head against it. Her eyes cloud and her ears dull and her limbs do not work and her tongue lolls like a slug in her mouth; she can do nothing other than watch them struggle. It shouldn’t last long, and it does not. Abel is larger, and stronger, and Cain, brought to his knees, begs for mercy while the sheepdog snaps and snarls.
What will you tell Mother.
Such a brazen ploy. So simple. She would never fall for it. But she knows that Abel will, because he, too, is simple, and she watches, immobile, as his anger melts and he extends a hand to his brother and Cain rises up.
Chapter eight
It was late by the time Jacob finished canvassing the neighborhoods below Castle Court.
He started at the bottom of the hill and worked his way up. The type of folks who elected to live thirty-plus minutes from the nearest supermarket were also the type of folks who didn’t take kindly to nighttime visits. Those who answered were reluctant to open the door, and those who did hadn’t seen anything. By general consensus, the murder house was an eyesore, abandoned as long as anyone could remember.
Number 332, the final stop before the road went to dirt, hid behind a high stucco wall bristling with pigeon spikes and brooding CCTV cameras.
Jacob craned through his car window, cajoling the homeowner over the intercom. For ten minutes he sat staring at the gate, a forbidding sheet of rust-finished steel, while she phoned the department to verify his badge number.
A motor ground; the gate shunted aside on recessed tracks. Lowering his brights, he wound up a crushed-stone driveway through tussocks and cacti toward yet another mid-century modern, well maintained, an asymmetric white cuboid forced into the terrain.
She was waiting by the front door in an emerald flannel bathrobe, a woman in her mid-fifties with scowl lines that broadcast across ten feet of darkness. He prepared to be told off.
Instead she introduced herself as Claire Mason, pressed a half-gallon mug of bitter tea on him, and escorted him through a tight, short entry hall into a living room with a buffed concrete floor and forward-sloping windows, like the prow of a spaceship as it plowed over an urban lightscape. Abstract Expressionist art crazed the walls. The furniture had been designed for skinny people with no children.
She batted away his questions with her own: Was she in danger? Should she be on the lookout for anything in particular? Should she call a neighborhood watch meeting? She was the president. She had moved out here to get away from all that.
He said, “Do you happen to know anything about the house up the road? Number 446?”
“What about it?”
“Who lives there?”
“Nobody.”
“Do you know who owns it?”
“Why?”
“This is really interesting,” he said of the tea, which tasted like it had been brewed from guano. “What is it?”
“Stinging nettle,” she said. “It prevents bladder infections. I own a gun. I don’t keep it loaded, but listening to you I’m thinking I might have to start.”
“I really don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
Eventually he quelled her agitation and steered the conversation around to the security cameras. Through the kitchen — onyx, more cement — to a converted pantry, replete with canned goods and alarm panels and a shortwave radio. A bank of monitors cycled through various exterior angles. The chair cushion showed the two-humped indentation of long, fond hours kept.
“Very impressive,” he said.
“I can access it on my phone and iPad, too,” she said, settling in.
In her needy preening, he recognized the paradox at the heart of any paranoiac: the validation that persecution provided.
“How long before the footage deletes?” he asked.
“Forty-eight hours.”
“Can you give me the road, yesterday, about five p.m. on?”
She brought up a window broken into eight panes, each showing a virtually identical blank strip. She clicked the counter, entered the time, set the playback to 8×, and hit the space bar.
Except for a change from full color to night-vision green, the windows remained static.
It was like the worst art film ever made.
“Can you speed it up a hair?” he asked.
She increased to 16×.
A shape zapped across the screen.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Coyote.”
“Are you sure? Can you go back?”
She rolled her eyes, rewound, set playback to 1×.
Sure enough: a shaggy, scrawny animal, slinking along with its tongue out.
“I’m amazed you could tell,” he said.
Claire Mason smiled dreamily at the screen. “Practice, practice, practice.”
Up at the murder house, he sat in the Honda, listening to the tick and clank of the overworked engine as it cooled. Every visit was taking years off its life. Between the Discover card and the advance on his salary, he supposed he could spring for a rental.
Anyone coming here by car would have to pass Claire Mason’s cameras. But he hadn’t seen tire tracks anywhere on the property, no crushed vegetation.
On foot? Hiking in, circumventing the road, head in a sagging Trader Joe’s bag?
A helicopter?
Jetpack?
Magic carpet?
Alakazam!
Oddly, the house looked less bleak than it had during the day, its menace effaced by a wide field of stars. Wind carried the snicks and clicks and hoots of animal life, abundant and invisible, creatures that come out at night.
He took his flashlight from the glove box, but didn’t need it to find his way to the front door. He didn’t need it inside, either. Moonlight mixed with city glow flooded the open air.
It felt significant to him that the place was both totally isolated and totally exposed.
You’d expect a body dump to be chosen with secrecy in mind. The staging reeked of exhibitionism, though, and those two facts in combination hinted at a desire for a specific audience.
Who owned this place?
Who knew about it?
He checked the sat phone for a missed call from Hammett. Frowned. No reception. These things were supposed to work anywhere.
He walked around, waving the phone, one bar dancing in and out. He managed to pin it down outside the master. He waited for a message icon to appear, but there was nothing.
The air was surprisingly free of death funk, and on the whole, he noticed that he felt less creeped out than he would have thought. Jacob was no mystic, but he did believe that people were drawn toward spaces that reflected their personalities, and that the soul of a residence and the soul inhabiting it grew progressively overlapped over time.
Here, he sensed a kind of serenity, verging on Zen calm. It would be a good place to write, or draw, or sculpt — an atelier in the sky, ideal for the rare artist who could afford it.