“Why now?”
Because now is the time. It will be.
“NO!”
Sunlight exploded into Curran’s eyes as they snapped open. He shot upright in bed, whirling his arms around trying to punch and kick at the same time.
“-wha?”
The alarm clock on his nightstand read 6:30.
Curran slumped back against the pillow.
A dream?
“Jesus Christ.”
A nightmare?
The sheets — what Curran thought were arms holding him — had wrapped themselves around his body. They felt wet. Sticky. Soaked with Curran’s sweat. In the struggle of the nightmare, he’d managed to get tangled up in them.
Or was it a nightmare?
The voice.
Curran rubbed his eyes. That voice. It spoke to me. And I spoke to it?
Impossible.
He felt wrecked. Like the four hours had rushed by in the space of five minutes. Curran glanced at the bedroom window, at the gray daylight poking in through the wooden blinds he’d installed a few months previously. Another cold November day.
But Curran wasn’t thrilled at what today might bring.
More sleep, he thought as he closed his eyes again. He needed more sleep.
If he could just keep the dark at bay.
And the evil he knew it contained.
Curran took Centre Street down to Columbus Avenue to work after he’d showered and shaved. Next to him on the seat, he’d brought a large container of orange juice and a banana muffin — testament to his fledgling exercise program. Curran wasn’t fat and he wasn’t out of shape, but he did want to lose a few paunchy pounds.
He sighed when the glass brick building that house the Boston Police Department headquarters appeared. A few years before, the department occupied a white stone building over on Berkeley Street just outside of Copley Square. Over the years, the number of cops inside had grown while space had dwindled. The city finally coughed up some money and built a new police headquarters.
Curran would have rather stayed at Berkeley Street and he knew plenty of cops who felt the same. The new building looked like someone had gone bargain shopping on the set of the Brady Bunch and pocketed the savings. The building was a shoebox of glass bricks and blocks. Even the simple sign wasn’t original. It was a direct rip-off of the one used by Scotland Yard.
Curran parked his car and walked into the building, showing his identification to the bored desk sergeant before heading upstairs on the elevator to the homicide division.
He sat at his desk, placed the bag of orange juice and muffins on one side and then unlocked his file drawer. Just as he was about to reach in, the phone on his desk purred. He grabbed it.
“Homicide, Curran.”
“It's Kwon.”
Curran glanced at his watch. “It's only nine. Shouldn't you be home asleep?”
“I should be, yeah. But I’m not. I'm at the office. You busy?”
“I was going to get a detailed jacket on the deceased from last night. Try to figure out why he got clipped.”
“Can you come down later? I want to run some more tests on this guy’s brain and see if we can’t figure out exactly why it is…the way it is.”
I already know, thought Curran. But he couldn’t very well tell Kwon that modern science didn’t have an explanation for it — annoying as that was to Curran. “Gimme two hours.”
“Good.” Kwon disconnected leaving Curran holding a dead phone and looking at his banana-nut muffins with a sudden lack of appetite.
He took a bite and swallowed, flushing it down with a healthy drag of orange juice. He turned and looked at the files in the drawers. Toward the back, he scooped out a five-inch stack of them and spread them out over his desk. Most of them were marked with the words “FBI: Official Government Property.”
Curran opened several of them and instantly felt himself transported back to when these cases were still fresh. He felt the sudden stir of adrenaline. The thrill of the chase reappeared.
For just a moment.
Now the case files were several years old.
Dusty.
Old.
Like Curran.
He frowned.
These files might just be useful again. Curran hoped they would be. He didn’t want to have to go through that hell again of trying to solve a case all of his former colleagues considered a dead-end.
Of course, things were different now. Now he didn’t have a wife to worry about. And now he didn’t have to think about his career with the illustrious FBI.
He slid the files aside and looked at his dark computer monitor. Curran liked it fine when it was dark and lifeless. Unfortunately, nowadays everyone worked on the things. And Curran’s old method of writing and using notebooks was deemed archaic.
There were a few older cops who still worked like Curran did. But most of them had been farmed out to the district offices where they couldn’t infect the minds of younger cops coming up through the ranks.
Somehow, they’d missed Curran.
He grabbed the muffin and took another bite, tasting the walnuts and banana flavors mixing together. He chewed slowly and then flicked the computer on.
It beeped once and then began prompting him for a series of access codes Curran still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to memorize them all. Security had become a lot tighter in recent years thanks to the war on terrorism.
Curran didn’t mind this part, though. After all, he’d lost a lot of friends in the attacks in New York and Washington. Security was one thing he could put up with.
After completing the log-on process, Curran switched over to the criminal database and entered the name of last night’s victim into it. The computer beeped once and then the screen blossomed into a long list.
Curran opened his favorite notebook and began taking notes.
By eight-thirty, he had a decent picture of the victim from the previous night.
And it wasn't a pretty one.
Gary William Fields, at the ripe young age of 32, had been a real slimeball. Curran looked at a rap sheet printout twice as long as his left leg and shook his head. Starting at twelve, Fields had been involved in a series of burglaries. By the time he was fifteen, he'd graduated to grand theft auto, assault, and armed robbery. He served a stretch at Norfolk House of Corrections back in the late eighties and then got out early on good behavior.
Good behavior. Curran smirked. As if there really was such a thing.
As soon as Fields got out, he went from bad to worse. Suspected in a series of horrible armed rapes out in Amherst, he was never indicted. And there was also suspicion that he'd killed at least five people in connection with drug trafficking. Sprinkled here and there were relatively “minor” incidents of indecent exposure to children, driving under the influence, assault, conspiracy, and racketeering charges.
“Real piece of work,” muttered Curran. He sighed.
If only this was a simple murder case. If only the modus operandi didn’t seem so familiar to Curran.
If only…a lot of things.
He grabbed his beeper off the desk and picked up his car down at the parking lot. Traffic crawled up Columbus Avenue thanks to the rush hour being in full swing. Curran flipped around the radio station until he found a music station he could actually tolerate. Lately, there didn’t seem to be many of them left.
Kwon split his time between the Albany Street office and the morgue down at Boston City Hospital. Most of the time he was in both places at once. At least that was what people thought. Kwon worked harder than six people and still managed to have an unusually active social life.
Unlike Curran.
He parked beneath the Suffolk County Court House close to where the runoff traffic from the federal offices parked. Upstairs, Kwon was still finishing the paper work when he walked in.
“'Morning.”
“The hell,” said Kwon. “I'm dead on my feet here.” He finished writing something and then looked up. “Got any thoughts on last night?”