Already he has slid into the DMV records and learned the name of the owner of that SUV. He has obtained the GPS code from the manufacturer of the vehicle and will know where it stops when the fleeing murderer garages it. He has also found a smartphone GPS locater issuing from the identical position of the SUV and moving with it now. It surely belongs to the killer.
Rifle in hand, he hurries into the kitchen. Nina and John have packed one cooler and closed it. The boy is almost done layering the last of the money in the second cooler, and Nina is shaping a length of aluminum foil to lay over it. Michael puts the AR-15 down and helps with the ice, then with the cans of soda and beer. They’re finished with the task in two minutes.
Nina expects to load the containers in the back of the Range Rover, but Michael says, “No time. Leave them here and come with me. Bring your Tac Light.”
“Come where?”
“Upstairs. An attic if there is one. As far off the battlefield as we can get.”
John is confused. “We’re hiding?”
“I’ll explain when we’re safe.” He snatches the rifle off the counter. “They’re less than three miles away, maybe eight minutes out.”
Mother and son are equally baffled and speak simultaneously: “Who? Who is?”
“The cavalry,” he says and further startles them by unlocking the back door.
He brooks no further delay, herding them through the ground floor to the front stairs.
Throughout the kitchen work, Michael has been both there and elsewhere, scooping ice but also swimming through the shared data networks of the nation’s telecom providers, seeking a name to match with the GPS signal issuing from the SUV that had been parked near the grave. By the time that he follows Nina and John as far as the landing between floors, he has the identity of the man who possesses the phone; it’s the same name the DMV lists as the owner of that vehicle. The murderer.
THE MYSTERY OF EVIL
Like a falcon on its hunting gyre, Calaphas circles the house. The stillness of the night’s creatures is reminiscent of the hush of the funeral home in which he was raised. Soon he will silence three more voices, bringing an even deeper quiet to this isolate, fateful property. His rifle comes with a sound suppressor attached, but even if the crack of a shot carries some distance through these hills of sleepers dreaming, and if a few awake, they will not know from what direction the sound came and will think it’s merely part of whatever stories they were telling themselves in sleep.
The hugeness of the moon, as he perceives it, and its icy appearance remind him of the terrible eyes of a woman named Britta Holdstrom, who was brought to Calaphas’s father on a December night, almost two months after the Halloween when Durand pinched off the breath of the old man on the gurney in the basement holding room. Britta was a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher, a beauty, who came home from Christmas shopping one night when a student, seventeen-year-old Gerry Grady, was lying in wait for her in the furnace closet off the garage. He rushed her after she unlocked the door between the garage and the laundry room, and a struggle occurred from there into the kitchen, where Britta fell and struck her head on the refrigerator and again when she collapsed to the floor. Not the brightest of lads, Grady intended to kill her after raping her, but somehow make murder pass for a suicide. Now she appeared to be dead. Coupling with a corpse didn’t excite him. Panicked, he decided to drag her into the garage, load her in her car, drive her to the old quarry road, and push her sedan into the depths of the abandoned stone mine with her behind the wheel, which he imagined would be taken for an accident. He conveyed her as far as the garage before his panic overwhelmed him, whereupon he fled the house. Britta was found two days later, after lying on a concrete floor beside her car, where the temperature had fallen to twenty-five degrees. The coroner concluded she didn’t die of head injuries. Still alive when Gerry Grady dragged her into the garage, she perished of exposure—essentially froze to death—while lying there unconscious.
Past midnight, the first hour of December twenty-sixth, back in the day. Having been emboldened by his Halloween adventure, young Calaphas waits until his family is asleep, and then he goes to the basement. There he will complete the transition from a mere boy to a boy with a great destiny that began two months earlier, though completing the transition isn’t his conscious intention. He visits the cold-holding room for two purposes: first, to see what Britta Holdstrom looks like naked; second, to determine what damage, if any, the limited autopsy did to her.
When he pulls out the morgue drawer and turns back the shroud from her head, he is looking into eyes as white as snow. Whether they crystalized as she lay dying in the frigid garage or some other cause explains them, Calaphas doesn’t know. Meeting that icy-white gaze, he remembers an animated film about a beautiful princess who is bewitched into eternal sleep—until she is awakened by the kiss of a prince. If he, a seven-year-old boy, can take the life from an old man and get away with it, perhaps he can restore life to this woman, which will mean that he must be a prince or will become one. He has no fear. His experience with the old man has cured him of fear. He presses his mouth to Britta’s cold lips, but she fails to wake. Although somewhat disappointed, he doesn’t close the drawer and leave. He remains curious about the size and shape of Britta’s breasts. When Durand draws the shroud farther down, revealing the objects of his curiosity, between those mounds lies a Hershey’s Kiss.
His humiliation is immediate and intense, his face burning with shame. Gifford has foreseen this moment, and by this bit of mockery has tarnished the triumph of his little brother’s Halloween visit to this chamber, when the hiding of a Hershey’s Kiss in a cabinet was proof of courage. Mortification shakes him as if it’s a wind risen out of his bones, storming through him. Leaving the chocolate drop where Gifford placed it, he draws the shroud over Britta—but then realizes the genius of the trap that has been laid. In the morning, when his father tends to the embalming, he will find the morsel of candy. Gifford has surely schemed a way to be sure that his brother will be blamed, though Durand can’t figure out how. If he takes the Kiss, there will be no outraged father in the morning, and Gifford will know what has happened. Then the endless jokes and torments will begin. Bitter resentment washes through Durand as he pulls back the shroud, retrieves the candy, covers Britta again, and closes the drawer. Making his way to his room by the thin beam of his penlight, he is blinded more by anger than by darkness, stumbling twice on the stairs, narrowly avoiding a collision with a console in the upper hallway.
When he reaches his bed, on his pillow is another piece of Hershey’s finest and a note: HOW DID HER NIPPLES TASTE, PERV? Anger has always been Durand’s weakness, anger and pride. Not covetousness or lust. Neither envy nor gluttony. Not sloth. Now his pride bleeds and his anger swells into rage, into fury, such a blazing wrath that he feels as if he might melt. And here the transition becomes complete. The incident on Halloween cured him of fear; ferocious anger burned it out of him forever. Now even hotter anger purges from him any capacity for guilt or shame. No fear, shame, or guilt ever again. He warns himself not to acknowledge finding either of the two Hershey’s Kisses or this note, never to respond to Gifford’s taunts, which will be coming by the hundreds. He must never give his brother the satisfaction of seeing him angered. If Durand keeps his fury unrevealed, the day will come, perhaps many years from now, when Gifford no longer expects revenge for this mockery. Then revenge can be taken.