Comes a Horseman (3 page)

“Ah,” Luco complained, wiping at his eye.

“Dishwasher soap. Nothing better for blood.” Antonio tossed the towel into the attaché, produced a comb, and ran it through Luco's hair. “Come.” He led Luco to a heavy fire door at the rear of the building and signaled for him to wait. He opened it and slipped through. Fifteen seconds later he was back, beckoning Luco outside.

A long alley ran away from the Asia House, cutting a canyon between two tall buildings. The only illumination appeared to be the glow of a mercury-vapor lamp on the far street where the alley ended. Everything else was submerged in blackness. Propping the door open with his foot, Antonio pointed down the alley. “The car is parked on Henriata Sold.”

Luco gripped the young man's shoulder and gave it a shake. He leaned closer.
“Grazie.”

Antonio whispered back, “Anything for you.”

Luco stepped into the dark alley, the click of his heels echoing quietly. The door closed behind him. He smiled.

It was finished.

And it had just begun.

2

The present
Garrisonville, Virginia

The boy had his mother's hair, dark and fine and shining. Brady Moore ran a hand over his son's head, feeling the soft strands slip through his fingers like water. Zach's face was turned away; his breathing was deep and rhythmic. Asleep, or almost. Sitting next to Zach on the bed, his back against the headboard, Brady gently scooted away and shifted his legs over the edge.

What at first glance might have been a tan wig lying on the bedspread at Zach's feet stirred. Then a head popped up from one side of the clump and swiveled toward him. This was Coco, the most loving Shih Tzu to grace the breed, Brady was sure, and Zach's ever-present companion since the boy was in diapers. Brady raised a finger to his lips. Coco, pink tongue protruding from a mouth-shaped part in his fur, simply watched Brady with eyes that were slightly bulging and slightly crossed. After a moment, the dog's head disappeared back into the collective whole.

Brady closed the book in his lap and set it on the nightstand, pushing aside a G.I. Joe and the accoutrements of make-believe warfare: a tiny canteen, a plastic M16, something that looked like a field radio. When they clinked against a picture frame, Brady let his eyes linger on the woman looking out from it. Pretty. No . . .
beautiful
. In that grand genetic crapshoot, her father's Chickasaw lineage had mixed with her mother's Teutonic ancestry to create a stunning progeny. Not just physically, though certainly her appearance was the first thing that had attracted Brady's attention. Dark, sultry. High cheekbones, narrow nose, doe eyes. The shape and composition of her features invited lingering scrutiny, the way some foods—Swiss chocolate came to mind—demanded to be savored. Then her personality revealed itself, along with her intelligence and wry humor . . . Some people seemed to have it all, and the best of them had no clue about the effect they had on other people.

That's Karen. She's so . . .

Brady stopped himself. Even eighteen months after her death, he thought of Karen in the present tense. A familiar ache pinched his heart, tightened his throat.

“Thinking of Mom?”

The voice was sleepy, so ethereal it took Brady a second to realize it had not originated in his own head.

He turned to see his son looking over his shoulder at him. The boy was all Karen. Besides the hair, his eyes, like hers, were the dark brown of polished coffee beans. Zach also possessed her not-quite-full lips that made a sudden jaunt upward at the corners, forming a smile even when it wasn't intended. It was that faux smile—on the mother, not the son who was at the time still seven years from conception—that had caused Brady to break away from his friends in line for a movie to ask the dark beauty if she'd mind if he held down the seat next to hers, seeing that he was a great movie companion, laughing in all the right places and sharing his popcorn. Never mind that she was in line to see something other than
The Untouchables
; he didn't know what and didn't care. It was only after they were engaged that he learned she hadn't been smiling at him after all. But his boldness in approaching a girl without the slightest hint of an invitation had made her say, “Sure, who in her right mind would turn down free popcorn?” Funny how things work. They had both been seventeen.

Brady leaned over the boy, propping himself up with one arm. “Hey, I thought you were asleep,” he whispered.

“Do you think she thinks of us?”

“All the time.” He leaned closer. “More than that. She watches us.”

Zach smiled. A real smile, not a trick of his lips. Brady didn't know how the boy did it. Here Brady was, thirty-three and feeling constantly on the brink of some chasm, some breakdown whose torments he couldn't imagine and from which he probably wouldn't return. At nine, Zach was holding it together much better. Lots of tears, sure, and times of melancholy no kid should experience. For the most part, however, he was functioning well, with healthy bouts of giggles and curiosity about babies and electronics and airplanes and only an occasional, if precocious, question concerning death, dying, and the afterlife. Ignorance is bliss? Or was it something else that enabled Zach to get on with his life? Whatever it was, Brady was glad for it.

“She watches me when you can't? Like when I'm at school and when you . . . go away?”

Brady's business trips were a painful subject. In fact, Zach's eyes were still red-rimmed from an earlier bout of tears over the trip Brady was going on the next day.

“Right,” Brady said. “All the time.”

“If she sees something bad happening, can she stop it?”

Brady thought for a moment. “I think she sort of whispers in our ears. ‘Don't step off the curb yet. Wait for that car to pass.' And ‘Don't climb that tree. There's a broken branch up there.'”

Zach nodded. Well, of course Mom would do that. He said, “Will you pick me up from school tomorrow?”

“No, Mrs. Pringle will do that.”

Zach made a sour face. At the foot of the bed, Coco whined in his sleep, as if agreeing with his master's opinion.

“What? You like Mrs. Pringle.”

“Yeah . . .” He hesitated. “It's just that she drives so slow, by the time we get home,
Scooby-Doo'
s over.”

“You should be doing your homework then anyway. Or playing outside while the sun's hot.”

“Yeah, but, Dad . . .
Scooby-Doo
.”

Brady knew how the boy felt. Time was when he and Zach would rent old episodes and spend an evening cracking up at Scooby and Shaggy's misadventures with ghosts, goblins, and other assorted spookies. Karen never saw the attraction, and since her death, Brady hadn't felt like yukking it up, even with Zach. So the boy watched reruns on his own and always got down to the business of being an energetic fourth grader after the show was over. Before Brady could respond, Zach continued, “And she's so
old
, like a hundred and something.”

“Not quite, but even if she were, what does it matter?”

He wrinkled his nose. “She smells funny.”

True enough. Mrs. Pringle was a widow in her seventies who smelled as if she stored herself in mothballs when she wasn't baby sitting Zach. But she had no problem in the mental acuity department, and despite operating at half speed, she seemed perfectly capable of doing all the things required to look after the boy. Weekday mornings, Brady saw his son off to the bus stop. After school, Zach went to a daycare center with several other schoolkids whose parents both worked or who had a single parent. Until a year and a half ago, Brady had never imagined that he'd fall into the latter category.

He knew some parents let their children stay home alone for the few hours between the end of school and the end of their work. He'd been in law enforcement long enough, however, to know latchkey kids were more likely to expose themselves to danger—by being careless or naive on the Internet, with fire, around strangers—and become victims of accidents or crime. During the infrequent times Brady worked late, Mrs. Pringle filled in. She may have been slow and odorous, but to Brady, the woman was a godsend.

“Look,” Brady said, “when I get home, we'll rent some
Scooby-Doo
s and watch them till our eyes fall out, okay?”

Zach brightened. “The two of us?”

A brief pause. “You bet.”

“You too?”

Brady let out a chuckle, as if it were a silly question, but of course it wasn't. “Me too,” he said.

“All right!” Instantly wide-awake, Zach scooted into a sitting position. “How long will you be gone?”

“A few days, at least. Maybe a week.”

The boy's face fell. “That long? Why do you have to go? Can't someone else do it?”

“It's my job, Zachary. Other people are doing their jobs.”

“Will Miss Wagner be there?”

Brady knew that Zach liked his partner, Alicia Wagner.

“She's there already. The Bureau decided to send us too late to get to the crime scene before the local police . . . processed it.”

“You mean before they contaminated it.”

Brady wasn't sure he liked his son so steeped in the ways of the FBI, its parlance and procedures.

He said, “That's right. So, anyway, there's no real hurry getting there. We'll do what we can, review the evidence, and hope to be there sooner the next time.”

Zach said, “Hope for the next time?”

The kid was quick.

“I don't mean hope there
is
a next time. Of course not. I mean, if the bad guy strikes again, we hope to get there sooner so we can help.”

Zach nodded.

Brady leaned over, parted his bangs, and kissed him on the forehead. “Now get to sleep, big guy,” he said. “I'll see you in the morning.”

As he rose, Zach gripped his arm. “Can we pray?”

Brady paused. It was a ritual Karen had started. Sinking back down onto the bed, he said, “You do it.”

The boy closed his eyes and began speaking in the gentlest of tones.

Brady noticed how the bedside lamp cast a warm glow over Zach's face. He never tired of observing his son, and now his eyes absorbed every detail, his mind storing it for instant recall while he was away. Between his entwined hands, Zach held his “blankie,” a threadbare infant blanket that he had originally given up at age four. Shortly after Karen's funeral, he'd had a number of bed-wetting incidents and had begun crying for his blankie. Fortunately, Karen, as organized as she was sentimental, had stored it in a box marked
Zachary's Baby Things
. The nighttime accidents had stopped, but Zach was now more attached to that raggedy cloth than he had been as a toddler. Mrs. Pringle kept stitching it back together, especially its silk trim, which Zach absently rubbed between forefinger and thumb when wearied or worried.

Wetting the bed, needing the blankie, clinging to Brady—these were Zach's telltale signs of distress. Brady's were anger and sullenness. He'd also developed a rigid skepticism of the so-called ordered universe. Man's notion that he could somehow shape his future was bunk. How many Ivy League grads wound up flipping burgers? Brady personally knew of one, and not because the guy was flaky, but because the universe was. Brady also remembered being shown the extensive security of a house from which a baby had just been kidnapped. And was a lifetime of exercise and healthy eating able to stop a drunk from plowing his car into you? Karen had discovered the answer to that one herself. “Fair” implied order, and life wasn't fair.

Zach's face leaned into his field of vision. “Dad?” he said.

Brady's eyes—and attention—refocused on his son. “That was great,” he said. “Thank you.”

Zach appeared skeptical but said only, “I'll miss you.”

Brady pulled him into his arms and squeezed. “Me too, son. Me too.” He laid the boy's head down on the pillow and switched off the lamp. At the door, he looked back. Light from the hallway spilled in, climbed the bed, and fell in a wide rectangle across the covered figure. Everything from the chest up was in darkness.

“Dad?” came Zach's voice from nowhere.

“Hmm?”

“Who are you after this time? What did he do?”

Brady considered his response. “Very bad things, Zach. Whoever it is needs to be caught.”

Silence. Brady pulled on the door, then stopped. He walked to the bed and resumed his position on it, eliciting another noisy exhalation from Coco. Here, he could make out Zach's face. “Don't worry,” Brady said. “I'll be extra safe. I
will
come home.”

It was a careless promise, he realized. No one could be 100 percent sure of surviving a stroll across a country road, let alone the pursuit of a serial killer. Still, Zach's experience with losing his mother made him especially aware of death's randomness and suddenness. Anything Brady could do to alleviate the boy's natural concerns, he would do. A family friend had given him a book about guiding a child through the loss of a parent. It had firmly recommended telling the child that indeed the surviving parent could also be “called home” anytime. Brady had dropped it in the trash.

Zach reached up to pull Brady in for one more hug. “You'd better,” he said.

3

Palmer Lake, Colorado

T
he beast moved through the woods like the falling of night. It crossed the rough terrain effortlessly and skimmed past branches that snagged at its thick fur. Through the trees, the moon became a strobe of flittering light and shadow, but the beast's vision was unaffected, always keen. It sensed everything: a rabbit scampered into its hole a meadow away; a doe had left dung here recently but was now long gone. The beast's companions, one on either side, kept pace, agile and powerful. Thirty paces behind, their master crunched over twigs and veered around obstacles, following. The beast smelled their destination before seeing it, a human odor, a human den. Fire. It had known they were heading toward fire but only now realized the smoke also marked their objective. It opened its mouth to let cool air fill its lungs, then exhaled in a low, hungry growl.