Hush (19 page)

That night, Ivy reran the day in her head. It
was so strange. Whenever she thought of her baby, she thought of
him as an infant—forever young. Over the years, she always had to
remind herself that no, he would be six now, or he would be nine
now. But no matter how often she reminded herself of what his age
would be, she always saw him as an infant, his face indistinct. He
always seemed so far away.

Sixteen ... If he'd lived, her baby wouldn't
be a baby, he'd be a young man. He'd be Ethan's age.

She pulled her black suitcase from under the
bed and opened it. Inside was a small gift box. She wasn't sure why
she'd brought it along, especially since it was something she
hadn't been able to open since putting it away sixteen years
ago.

When she took on her new identity, she was
supposed to leave everything from her old life behind. Not just so
she couldn't be traced, but so she could become a new person. But
there was one item she had refused to part with.

She sat down on the bed and untied the blue
ribbon. With shaking hands, she tried to make herself open the
box.

She couldn't.

It would hurt too much.

It was said that time healed. For Ivy, that
wasn't the case. Being a psychologist, she understood the stages of
grief and knew she hadn't completely faced what had happened all
those years ago. Being the mother of a murdered child, she feared
she never would.

Max and Ivy sat in an unmarked car in
Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. In another car, on the opposite side
of the gathering, were two plainclothes officers. Darkness had
fallen and white tapered candles with paper shields were being lit.
Two days earlier, an article announcing the candlelight vigil had
run in Wednesday's edition of the Herald, making the press and the
Chicago Police Department temporary allies.

Graceland Cemetery was located in Area Three,
just a block north of Wrigley Field. The famous cemetery protected
the remains of people like Marshall Field and George Pullman. It
was also said to be haunted.

In order to keep the ghosts in and the people
out, a towering redbrick wall surrounded the grounds, the wall
topped with three rows of razor wire. The massive iron gates were
locked every evening at precisely 5:00 P.M., and it was only by
special permission that the police had been allowed to stage the
candlelight vigil.

"This place is supposed to be haunted," Ivy
said, her throat tight as she struggled to calm her stomach, trying
to divert herself with talk of ghosts, because it wasn't the ghosts
that unnerved her, but the possibility of coming face-to-face with
the Madonna Murderer.

"I've heard that," Max said. "What's the name
of the statue that's supposed to walk around at night?"

"Eternal Silence."

"Also known as Statue of Death. Total
bullshit."

"Is that thing on?" she asked, referring to
the palm- sized video camera he held in his hand.

He fiddled with the focus. "Ready to
roll."

He pushed a button and the camera began to
hum as he unobtrusively recorded the event playing out in front of
them. "Nine thirty-two p.m.," he said in a monotone voice for the
sake of documentation. That was followed by the date, the case, and
the two people present. "Big turnout," he commented.

"You don't believe in ghosts?" she asked.

"No, do you?" His voice had the slightly
distracted quality of someone concentrating on something else while
trying to carry on a conversation.

"I've never actually seen anything that would
lead me to believe ghosts exist, but I have to admit I've heard
some pretty convincing stories."

"Mass hysteria. That's all. Like that school
full of kids in Tennessee. Hundreds of them were admitted to
surrounding hospitals. They were dropping like flies. They just had
to touch somebody and they went down. Thought they were the victims
of biological warfare. Tox screens came out okay. Air tested fine.
Nothing was found."

"I remember hearing about that," Ivy said,
beginning to relax.

"The mind can play strange tricks on a
person."

"It's called psychogenic illness," Ivy
said.

"Oh, Christ. No psychology lesson,
please."

"Can you turn off the sound?"

"Why? Don't want the inaneness of this
conversation exposed to the entire task force?"

"Exactly."

"They love that kind of thing."

"That's what I'm afraid of. How many people
do you think?" Ivy asked. "Fifty? Sixty?"

"Closer to a hundred."

But then five of those hundred were officers.
Twenty more were probably curiosity seekers.

"I think he's too smart to fall for this,"
Max commented.

"Doesn't matter. He doesn't have to fall for
it. He'll know the whole thing's being enacted for his benefit.
Hopefully he won't be able to keep from enjoying the attention.
With nothing to tie him to the murders, he should feel somewhat
safe."

"Bathing in the glory."

"That's right."

"See anybody suspicious?"

"How about the tall guy near the tree, to the
right of the crowd?"

Max squinted. "Shit. That's Carpenter. I told
him to blend, not lurk. He may as well be wearing a damn
uniform."

"Time for me to join the party," Ivy said,
picking up the bouquet of flowers from her lap and reaching for the
door handle.

"Wait." Max fiddled with the dome light so it
wouldn't come on when she opened the door.

Earlier, it had been decided that Max should
keep a low profile, since his face might be familiar to the killer,
thanks to the media. And even though Ivy's picture had appeared in
the paper, she hadn't been identified: She could very well be a
friend or relative.

With the light off, Ivy slipped from the car
without fear of attracting undue attention, solidly closing the
door behind her.

The night air was heavy and humid. Crickets
chirped and fireflies played among the tombstones. When she was
little, Ivy used to lie in bed on hot nights, counting the cricket
chirps outside her open window to determine how old she would be
when she died. How strange that children played such dark games. So
much of their play dealt with death and violence. Did anyone else
think that was peculiar?

Stick a needle in my eye.

If I die before I wake.

Blackbirds baked in a pie.

Pray to God my soul to take.

Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

Three blind mice.

It had rained that morning, and the ground
under her square heels sank as she made her way across the grass,
moving in the direction of the shifting white lights and bowed
heads, in the direction of the murmur of prayers.

At the edge of the crowd, someone offered her
a lit candle. She accepted it, whispering a thank-you as she
glanced up into the face of a middle-aged man.

Is it you? she silently asked, trying to
memorize a face she could barely distinguish in the flickering
candlelight which threw black slashes of moving shadows across his
cheekbones, his forehead. Fingertips brushed hers and she looked
down, prepared to see talons instead of nails.

Too dark.

He flashed her a wistful smile. As he turned
to leave, firelight suddenly washed away the shadows, revealing
tear-filled eyes.

Not you, she thought.

But he won't look like a monster, she
reminded herself. He'll look like anybody else. He could be capable
of tears. That's what people didn't understand. That's what the
public had to be made to realize.

She moved deeper into the now singing crowd,
her mouth beginning to move, her voice taking up the words of a
song long forgotten, from a time when she'd gone to church and
prayed like everybody else.

Silly people, she thought with sorrow-tinged
affection. With your Saint Christopher medals and your rosaries and
your holy water. How many of them were praying, not for Sachi and
her baby, but for themselves? Thinking that if they were good
enough, prayed enough, smiled enough, tithed ten percent of their
income to the church, that they would be safe from the kind of
horrors that had befallen Sachi Anderson? Didn't they understand
that the same God who created them had also created the Madonna
Murderer? Wasn't that exactly how Jeffrey Dahmer justified his
killings? Saying God had made him a predator? That he was simply
carrying out God's wish?

The scent of earth from the fresh graves hit
her. She saw they were marked with photos and stuffed animals and
hanging baskets. And she thought of another small grave, in another
cemetery, in another part of town, a grave she'd never visited. . .
.

Ivy bent and put her bouquet with the others,
then straightened as the last verse of the song died out. Someone
began to pray. Someone else began to wail with a voice that was
wild and high.

Ivy lifted her head, trying to find the
direction of the wailing, but the voices rose and fell as the sound
was carried from person to person, soul to soul.

A sense of evil seeped into her, a black pit
of no remorse, no guilt, no blame. The surface of her arms tingled;
the hair on her scalp shifted and cold air rushed down her cheeks
and neck. She wanted to move, wanted to get away, go back to the
car where Max Irving sat with his video camera. But her feet felt
like lead, her muscles atrophied.

And she knew with utmost certainty that the
man who had killed her baby, the man who had killed Sachi Anderson,
was somewhere in the crowd watching. He had turned the tables on
them, and suddenly something that had been devised to flush him out
had instead turned into a way for him to hide in plain sight.

She forced herself to stay ten more minutes,
then she made her way back to the parked car.

He watched her walk away.

Hers was a familiar face. The face from the
paper. The face that was now in his scrapbook. The face that had no
name.

He paid close attention to where she went, to
the car she got into, to the license plate. CR 427. All numbers
were significant.

When she opened the door, no dome light came
on. Which meant she was a cop. She got into the passenger side.
Which meant there was another cop with her. Detective Irving?

He liked to keep up with the investigators
and their families. He liked to know what was happening in their
lives, liked to follow them so he could keep tabs on their likes
and dislikes. In that way, he could engage them in conversation if
he ever so desired.

He'd attended the first communion of
Sinclair's daughter, and he'd sent a stuffed bear to his
granddaughter, Kiki.

He was very curious by nature, and he had to
find out who the woman was.

He turned back to the vigil. It was for him.
He knew that.

Stupid people. Stupid, stupid people.

They were all there for him. The cops. The
candles. The people. The sad, sad people. For him. Who said one
person couldn't make a difference? He'd touched them all. Every one
of them.

Whores, whores, whores.

He grew hard. Dirty boy. Dirty, dirty
boy.

Something nagged at the back of his mind. The
baby. The photo of the baby someone had put on the grave.

You saved him, he told himself. Saved him!
Comforted, he raised his voice in song.

Ivy stepped into the task-force headquarters,
where members of the team were huddled around a computer screen.
Irving was perched on the corner of a desk he'd staked out as his,
one foot on the floor, the other dangling, making his creased gray
slacks short enough to show a brown sock that appeared to have had
bleach spilled on it.

It seemed she'd walked in on the task force's
version of Interpretation Theater. The sound had been turned off,
and Ramirez was adding his own dialogue to the videotape that had
been made the previous night. The view was quite obviously from a
car. Near the bottom of the screen was the top curve of the
steering wheel.

"Oh, yeah," Ramirez was saying in a high,
feminine voice. "Put your hand there. Right there."

Everybody laughed, and then someone else
added another ad-lib. "Cemeteries turn me on."

A burst of fresh laughter.

"Cemeteries make me hot."

Another burst of laughter. Then Hastings
spotted Ivy standing inside the door. Her smile dissolved. One by
one, officers looked behind them to see what had changed Hastings'
expression.

They were treating her like an old
schoolmarm. Was she that stuffy? That serious?

Maybe. Probably. In fact, Ivy could barely
recall a time when she'd laughed a laugh that wasn't tinged with
sorrow. These young officers could still cut up because even though
they saw evil on a regular basis, they hadn't been touched by it
personally.

"Don't stop because of me," she told
them.

"We were just having some fun," Hastings
said, trying to fill the silence that had collected around
them.

Ivy slid her backpack across one of the long,
lunchroom-style tables.

"We were actually waiting for you," Max said,
rewinding the tape to the beginning.

"The el was crowded. I had to wait for a
second train."

She was finally getting the hang of getting
around Chicago after so many years away, but she still hadn't quite
figured out what now qualified as rush hour. And with metro
universities making more and more downtown warehouses into student
housing, the morning trains were often filled with just as many
summer- session students as office workers.

Playtime over, the team quickly got down to
business. It turned out that everyone involved in the vigil
stakeout had taken note of the man who'd given Ivy the candle.

"A weird-ass," Hastings said.

The tech at the computer stopped the video at
the very moment light met the man's face. A few key clicks and the
face filled the entire screen. Another click and the image was
being printed out.