The Dead Room (36 page)

The tip tore through his jacket, then plunged into something soft and stayed there. Blood splattered all over the snow, and he tumbled onto the ground. In a split second he assessed the damage. He felt no pain and knew that he hadn’t been stabbed. When he looked at the man squirming beneath him, he saw the blade of the knife stuck deep into his right thigh. Maybe even all the way through. He caught the rotten teeth and heard the man cackling. Saw the madness smoldering in his eyes like coals glowing at the end of a house fire. It was
him
, and Teddy did a double take.

It was the face Holmes had described in his dreams.

Not a woman or a man, but a pale and lifeless ghost. Chasing him and laughing at him. Pushing his hands and face into Darlene Lewis’s body to leave fingerprints and lip prints and a trail of evidence the police could find.

Teddy threw a shaky punch, aiming at those teeth. When he missed, he threw another and hit the mark.

Trisco’s eyes lit up and he groaned. He wrenched the knife out of his leg and kicked his feet in the air. For some reason he was wearing socks over his shoes, and Teddy stared at them half a moment too long. He took a hard shot to the head, paused as he heard the barn door opening, and watched Trisco flee across the yard.

He jumped to his feet, shouting at his mother as he raced toward the house. “Get back inside and lock the door.”

Trisco vanished around the corner, heading for the driveway. Teddy ripped open the back door and bolted upstairs. His father’s shotgun was hanging on his bedroom wall. He grabbed the rifle, switched off the safety, leaped down the front stairs. As he rushed onto the front porch, he spotted Trisco legging his way down Waterloo Road.

Teddy sprinted across the driveway into the neighbor’s yard, vaulting over the fence and tearing through the bushes. He could see Trisco on the other side of the trees, hobbling toward a black BMW. He could feel his heart beating as he gripped the gun and dug in his heels. He hit the trees and burst onto the street. The driver’s side door slammed shut and the engine turned over.

Teddy raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger.

The gun rocked back into his shoulder and the muzzle flashed, waking up the dead of night with the sound of burning gunpowder. Teddy’s eyes skipped through the flash to the rear window, watching it shatter into a thousand pieces. Shards of glass sprayed through the car all over the front seat and dash, and he heard Trisco groan.

The BMW whined back at him like a wounded animal, its wheels churning up snow as it strained to pull forward and escape. Teddy fired a second blast from twenty-five yards off. He heard the sound of buckshot piercing sheet metal, but the car hurtled down the road at high speed. Trisco switched on his headlights. A quarter mile down, the lights blinked on and off in the darkness. When they blinked a second time, Teddy wondered if it wasn’t a message from Trisco that he was okay.

*          *          *

There wasn’t enough time to come forward and explain to the local police that he’d just been attacked by a mad-dog serial killer. He’d seen the neighbor’s windows light up as he ran back toward the house. He guessed they were calling 911.

Because the shots had come from Sanctuary Road, the cops would focus their attention on the pine forest and the last open field across the street. Deer roamed freely here. Over the past few years, the herd had become quite large. Poachers were known to hunt in state parks at night. It wasn’t too big of a stretch to think someone had taken an illegal shot at a buck and raced off. The whining sound of Trisco’s BMW stealing into the night might even help sell the story if the cops bothered to stop by and ask. Teddy didn’t think they would.

He tapped on the barn door. When it opened, he saw the look on his mother’s face and knew nothing would fly but the truth. Her eyes were roving over his body and torn jacket, instinctively checking his arms and legs and counting the number of fingers on his hands.

“I’m in trouble,” he said. “The man we’re looking for has found me.”

“Are you hurt?”

He shook his head. “But it isn’t safe here. You need to pack a bag and go over to Quint’s. I need to get downtown.”

She looked at the shotgun, but didn’t say anything. She’d heard her son fire the weapon. The smell of gunpowder lingered in the air.

“We need to hurry,” he said.

She gave him a nervous look but understood. “I’ll call Quint right away.”

He stepped back from the door to let her pass, then followed her down the path to the house. He could see her wheels turning. He could tell she was dredging up the past and trying to make sense out of what happened tonight without enough details to fill it all in. As they reached the kitchen door, he grabbed the handle and opened it for her.

“When Dad went to prison,” he said, “how did you know he didn’t do it?”

She turned back, confused. “Why would you ask that now?”

“Could you see it in his face, Mom? His eyes?”

“No,” she said in a quiet voice. “Your father couldn’t hide his emotions very well. He looked guilty because he felt guilty. That was the problem.”

“You mean the police found out how much cash the company had and assumed he did it.”

She nodded. “Your father thought he should’ve seen it coming and blamed himself for the murder.”

“If he looked guilty, then how did you know he wasn’t?”

She thought it over. “I just
did
,” she said after a moment. “When he died and his accountant came forward admitting what he’d done, I wasn’t surprised. Your father and I thought it was him all along.”

“What about the prosecutor? Did you tell him?”

“He was young and wouldn’t listen. He was trying to make a name for himself. Your father was a trophy.”

Her gaze fell away and she stepped inside. When she went upstairs to pack, Teddy checked the lock on the front door, peering through the glass to the street. He didn’t see any sign of the cops, and didn’t think Trisco would be back until he could deal with his wound. Heading up to his room, he returned the shotgun to its rack and grabbed a flashlight. Then he hurried down the hall, looking in on his mother before he went downstairs. She was sitting on the bed, speaking with Quint on the phone. Thank God for Quint.

“I’ll be in the backyard,” he whispered.

She nodded. She was upset, worried about him, unable to hide it.

Teddy checked the flashlight for power as he rushed down the steps to the kitchen and grabbed a handful of plastic bags from the drawer. Once outside, he crossed the yard to the fence and panned the light across the ground. Trisco had been wearing socks over his shoes. It seemed so strange at first. But as Teddy examined the footprints in the snow, he knew why. The indentations were soft and round without any definition. There was something diabolically ingenious about it. Teddy shook his head, following the tracks toward the barn until he reached the grove of rhododendrons by the window.

He lowered the light to the ground. There wasn’t as much blood as he remembered. Trisco might be in pain right now, but wasn’t mortally wounded. The thought crossed Teddy’s mind that he was about to interfere with a crime scene. That he should return to the house and call 911 immediately, even Nash. But then the downward cycle would begin all over again, he thought. The local cops would listen to his story and have evidence to gather whether they believed him or not. Rumors would follow, history unearthed. The house would be a crime house again, irrevocably linked to murder. People would drive by and point, just as they had when his father was arrested. Some would get out of their cars and have their pictures taken in front of the house. If his mother was in the yard, they might even ask her to pose with them. It had happened before. Not to his mother, but to him just after his father’s death. A middle-aged couple had parked across the street and wanted to take a picture while he raked leaves in the front yard. They were strangers, but seemed friendly. Teddy wasn’t sure if he was supposed to know them or not. He was just a boy at the time, trying to sort his way through the confusion. They wanted a picture of him standing before the house and he agreed. When he told his mother about it, she called them ghouls and started to cry.

Not this time.

Teddy knelt down and scooped the bloodstained snow into the bag. As he stood up, he spotted the glass he’d dropped before the struggle. A candy wrapper lay beside it in the snow. He moved toward it, carefully eyeing the wrapper without touching it. Flipping it over with a stick, he read the label. It was the wrapper from a grape-flavored Tootsie Pop. It looked like something was smeared on it and he moved closer. When it registered that he was staring at cum, he flinched. He looked at the window, playing the scene back in his head. Trisco had been spying on his mother with his dick out. The sick motherfucker had been jerking off.

He shuddered, fighting off the urge to vomit. After he caught his breath, he flicked the wrapper inside a second plastic bag with the stick. Holding the bag to the light, he pressed the seal and double checked its grip. Then he glanced back at the house and saw his mother in the kitchen ready to go. She looked so innocent. Almost like an angel. He knew she hadn’t asked for this.

As he stood up and crossed the lawn with two samples of the serial killer’s DNA, he thought about firing the shotgun. The feel of the kick, and the roaring sound it made. He could see the window exploding into the car. The wheels gripping the asphalt beneath the snow. The license plate fading into the gloom. The plate was issued in Pennsylvania. Teddy had always been good at remembering numbers. This was one he wouldn’t need to write down. D07-636.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Teddy stood over the jury table, cupping his hands around the coffee mug and soaking in its warmth. Nash was at his desk, on the phone with an agent from the FBI’s field office in Center City. He’d given the agent Trisco’s license plate number and was trying to explain why Teddy collected blood and semen samples on his own and fucked up the crime scene. It didn’t sound as if it was going very well. Nash sipped his drink undaunted. Not his usual coffee, but a glass of Skyy vodka poured over ice.

Teddy shuddered. He could still hear Trisco laughing. Still see him in the snow giggling with the knife spiked through his leg like a lightning rod.

His decision to touch the evidence had been made in the heat of the moment after firing a gun at another human being. He’d been worried about his mother, his own family and their past.

He shook it off. What mattered was that he and Nash weren’t alone anymore. They were working with the FBI again, and had been the minute they returned from their meeting with Trisco’s psychiatrist that afternoon. They’d called Nash’s friend in Washington and given Dr. Westbrook a full report. The field office had been mobilized, and the FBI would be running their own stealth investigation in spite of Holmes’s bogus confession to the district attorney.

Teddy looked at the stack of faxes on the jury table that had been coming in from the field office all night. Before his arrest five years ago, Edward Trisco III had been a promising artist of some talent. His name was mentioned in several art journals, and the reviews in most cases were better than good. But as his insanity burgeoned, Trisco seemed to lose his edge. His last one-man show had been a disaster, and the articles began to dwindle off. When he kidnapped the model, they stopped all together and his career was over.

A copy of the model’s initial statement was here. The one she had made before Trisco’s parents choked her with fistfuls of cash. Teddy picked it up and began reading. When Trisco wasn’t painting the girl, he kept her in his bedroom closet, bound and gagged. He’d broken three of her fingers and managed to sprain her wrist. Bite marks were visible on her body and photographed by a police photographer after her escape. As Teddy studied the photos, it didn’t seem as if she and Trisco met at a party, got high, and had a falling out.

He turned away and glanced out the window. The streets were empty, the hour late. He couldn’t shake the image of Trisco’s face. The one haunting Holmes in his dreams. There was something familiar about it. He’d seen him before, but couldn’t remember where. That off-center look in his eyes. His madness in full bloom. Teddy couldn’t believe that Andrews hadn’t seen some trace of his insanity five years ago. Even if he was blind, Teddy wondered how Andrews could give Trisco a pass after reading the victim’s statement. And what about Trisco’s family? What were they saying to Andrews as they handed him a check written in blood for his campaign?

Edward’s a good boy at heart. He had a crush on the girl. He didn’t mean to sprain her wrist, break her fingers and bite her. He would’ve untied her and let her go. Edward’s a good boy and would have let her go....

Nash hung up the phone and sipped his drink. He looked pale and subdued, more worried than Teddy had ever seen.

“They want the DNA,” he said.

“Are they pissed?”

“They want it. Let’s leave it at that. Two agents in plain-clothes are driving out to your house. They’ll take a look and keep an eye on things.”

“What about the license plate?”