A Cruel Season for Dying (30 page)

Darius pulled his eyes away. “This the pastor?” he asked. He had turned to the dead man.

“Yes. Father Kellog. Apparently, a secondary victim. He must have surprised the killer.”

The priest’s smashed head lay in a browning mess, his glazing eyes locked on an image burned into the retina. Darius stood
perfectly still, as if filtering something ephemeral through the coppery stench of blood.

“I told Willie I’d just give this a look.”

“It’s your call.”

Darius turned back to the bludgeoned priest lying near the figure of St. Joseph, looked upward to the body strung midair above
the
manger. The girl’s tiny head was slumped against one shoulder. She looked as though she had fallen asleep, strands of her
short black hair caught in the white feathers. The familiar ash markings stood out darkly beneath breasts that were no more
than ripples in the pale chest. Her hairless mons a small flower enfolded between perfect legs.

“I still don’t know if I want to do this, Jimmy,” Darius said, his eyes moving to
PENEMUE
scribbled across the wall.

They both knew he lied.

Slowly and evenly, against the pull of the weights, the man let his thighs relax and sat up straighter on the padded bench.
The exercise area was dim and womb warm. He liked to work out in low light, as close to naked as possible, his concentration
centered on the minute workings of his body, the purity of form in motion. But tonight it was a solace that had failed to
keep horror at bay.

The images flashed like blades behind his eyes, companions for his memories of the accident. In the gloom of the church, the
white oldman face, a death mask turning toward him, its flagging muscles struggling to register the signals firing in the
brain. Surprise. Recognition. Terror. The last had stuck. Short-circuited in place by the blows from the candlestick in his
hand.

It was pure reaction that had allowed him to so swiftly silence the old man.
Collateral damage,
in the words of the current catch phrase. Kellog, a priest, neither neutral nor civilian. An enlistee on the enemy’s side.
It was the metaphor of
Enoch
taken too far and he knew it. What was real was that he had killed in cold blood to protect himself from the police. Like
that first sin, which had made fugitives of the Fallen, this error, too, would have its karmic price. Of that he had no doubt.

He leaned over, running a hand over the long scar that ran down from his knee, massaging with his fingers the muscle beneath
the puckered flesh. There was no denying it, the leg hurt, reinjured tonight in the church when he’d scaled the grappling
rope with the deadweight of the girl’s body dragging at his back.

He reached for the towel and dried himself, but the scent of anxiety remained, a base note in the odor of his sweat. He could
not escape the
acuity of his senses. Even as a child his sense of smell had been remarkable. Since his awakening, the degree of sensitivity
could become almost painful as the immediacy of the tunnel experience faded and the body fought to reassert itself. And the
truth was, he yet loved this prison of flesh.

The admission brought forth a memory of Marian, of how she had looked that first day she’d modeled for him in his studio.
Photography had been the one interest he’d retained from his time in the service, and his first critical success had been
with pictures he’d taken in post-war Vietnam. But his photojournalism had been sidetracked when the fashion magazines had
called. He’d been surprised at first with the offers, but he admired the work of others in the field, and the money was good.
And then it had brought him Marian.

Her coming into his life had seemed like an unearned blessing, a sign that the universe could also be randomly good. Later
after the accident, he’d looked back on their meeting as something else. A cruel tease dangled, to be snatched away. And yet
he had no regrets. What he and Marian had shared was simple human happiness. That was the irony.

He walked to the bathroom and removed one of the vials and a fresh syringe from the cabinet. Marian was dead. Father Kellog
was dead. And so, despite the continued existence of his body, was his human persona. The drug was a reminder. It dissolved
the bonds that anchored him in the flesh, made it possible to recover some of what he’d experienced in the tunnel.

He went to his bedroom and lay down, letting the needle bite deep. “Gad-ri-el.” He spoke the syllables, an invocation to himself.
Gadriel,
he repeated in his mind, over and over, waiting for the drug to take hold, longing for the brief moment of knowing that came
before the end, a never-quite-reached memory of the brightness he had been.

This time the programming didn’t work. He couldn’t keep his focus. The room transformed, pulsed with color. Zavebe appeared
in human form, as he had last seen her, her happiness an arrow. The colors warped to blackness. Zavebe remained, an image
that floated in the abyss. His own body bag was gone. He existed as a burden of loneliness only, as the knowledge of what
he had to do.

Z
oe felt totally stupid. But she seemed to have no control. She had gone back to the paper, sure. But once there, she’d headed
straight to the ladies’ room, where the tears had just come. Not sobs, or heaves, or any of that stuff. Just tears. Buckets
of them welling from her eyes as she sat curled on the sofa in the corner of the lounge with a roll of tissue, mopping her
eyes.

She could have sat in a stall, but she didn’t, as if the tears insisted they be at least semipublic. The few women from the
early Sunday crew who’d drifted in and out had seen enough in her face not to ask questions. But one of them, probably Rhonda,
the new copygirl on the make, had ratted her out to Garvey the minute he’d shown up to oversee Monday’s edition. Her editor,
who practically lived at the paper, was a red-haired bear-giant of a man, and the last vision you’d expect to appear in the
women’s rest room. But here he was, in the too, too solid flesh, staring down at her.

“What the fuck’s the matter?”

It wasn’t concern for her that had propelled him in here. Garvey had, as they said, a nose for the news. He sensed not some
personal tragedy, but a story.

“I got a tip on a murder scene,” she answered him evenly enough. The tears dried up for the moment. “An address out in Brooklyn.”

“Our gay killer?” A heightened interest replaced the aggravation in his voice.

“I thought so. Sakura’s team was called out.”

“But it wasn’t our guy?”

Our guy.
She felt the sour bubble of a smile. The way Garvey saw it the paper had a proprietary claim to this monster.

“Are you going to let me tell this?” She allowed her own irritation to show. She never played the vamp with Garvey. Let him
see her with her eyes all puffy and red. She liked him, most of the time. He was a stand-up newsman who’d go to bat for his
reporters.

“Sure,” he said.

“The address in Brooklyn turned out to be a church.”

His interest shot up a notch. He kept his mouth shut.

“They were already setting up barricades,” she said, “but I managed to sneak around, find an open door in the back.”

“You got inside?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “The church was old … big. It was easy to hide in the pews.”

“What did you see?”

“A little girl.” She tried unsuccessfully to hide the crack in her voice. “A little girl hung up with wings above the Nativity
scene by the altar.”

“Dead?”

She nodded again. A reprieve against speaking. “She was supposed to be an angel,” she explained, getting the words out.

“Shit. That’s sick.” His gaze drifted inward, setting up calculations. “So it wasn’t the same guy?” he said.

“There was another body. A priest.” She avoided an answer. “His head was bashed in. The cops figured he must have surprised
the killer.”

“You talked to the cops?”

“No. They never knew I was there. I just stayed in the pews and listened.”

“Good girl, Zoe.” The calculation tallied up. “The gay killer thing is money in the bank, but a little girl, a priest … Christmas.
It doesn’t get any bigger than that.” He had almost said
better.

“It
was
the same guy.” She dropped the bombshell now. The good bomb. The bad would come soon enough.

“What?”

“It was the same guy,” she repeated. “Seems he puts wings on all the victims.” The tears welled again. She tilted her head
back, containing them. “The cops are going nuts,” she said. “The gay thing was their only angle. The little girl shoots their
profile all to hell.”

“Shit.” Garvey smiled. “Think what this will do for circulation. Now it’s not only the gays. Anybody could be a victim, just
like Son of Sam. Nobody is safe in this town.”

A tear slipped down her face.

“Goddamn it, Zoe,” he reacted. “I thought you, of all people, understood what we do here. We personalize the news, unsterilize
it.” The slate blue eyes fixed her, not cold, but unrelenting. “Isn’t it better to make this little girl’s death real to our
readers than to leave her bloodless and faceless? I just wish you’d had a photographer.”

“I had my camera.” She had considered lying, but she was suddenly eager to tell him. “There are the pictures.” She pointed
to the waste-basket that sat next to the sofa, where gray loops of film coiled amidst the wads of discarded tissue.

“You exposed the goddamn film?” he exploded.

“Yeah, Garvey, I destroyed it,” she said. “Why did you think I was crying?”

For many detectives on homicide, the required attendance at autopsies was the worst part of the job. For Sakura, it was the
formal identifications. The sights and smells of the forensic procedure were always horrific, but the victim quickly became
an abstraction—the corpse on the table shedding its secrets without further pain. Informing family members that a loved one
had been murdered, waiting with them in the unforgiving spareness of the morgue elevator room, was much more immediate and
real. With these strangers he intruded, a witness to unguarded emotion, to that first terrible change in lives that would
never be the same.

Homicides involving children were the worst. Dominick Mancuso’s face leaked hope. Sakura, sitting next to him in the plastic
chair, was unbearably aware of the effort that kept the man upright and composed.

A high sucking whine announced that the elevator had lifted from the basement. Mancuso flinched as if he’d been struck, but
he rose without speaking and walked with the detective to the viewing window. Standing at his shoulder, Sakura could see the
man’s haggard face reflected in the glass. The depth of the misery it contained seemed a measure of his own denial—the lie
that the pain he dealt with every day never reached beyond his work.

The gurney with its small, sheet-draped body had risen into view. Dominick Mancuso stood hunched and silent. For a very long
time, he stared at the doll-like face, studying it so carefully that Sakura allowed himself to wonder if there had been some
mistake. But at last a sigh, like air abruptly stirring, rattled itself from out of Mancuso’s chest. Tears formed and fell,
one and then another down his face.