Билл Пронзини - In an Evil Time

“Would it do any good?”

“You know how I feel. I couldn’t stand to go through an operation. I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”

“Then I won’t say a word. But I want you to do one thing for me in return.”

“If I can.”

“Don’t lie to me anymore. Don’t evade the truth, or stretch it, or hide behind it. We’re a team, remember? Don’t fight me anymore.”

“I won’t,” he said. And he wouldn’t, where the cancer was concerned. Eric and Rakubian were another matter. Hiding that truth was a necessity — an act of mercy, an act of love.

Monday Afternoon

Napoleon Macatee drove up from the city to examine the evidence of Rakubian’s stalking. Hollis and Cassie met him at the house at two o’clock. He was a black man in his fifties, stocky and solid as a barrel, with eyes like brown wounds. Those eyes had seen a great deal and would never be surprised or shocked by anything again. At once the eyes of a cynic and a martyr.

He seemed forthcoming enough when Hollis asked if there were any new developments. The short answer, he said, was no. He’d spoken to Angela twice (as they had; she’d called after her first talk with Macatee, again a few days later). He’d spoken to Eric, a fact he mentioned briefly and without a hint of suspicion. He’d spoken to dozens of Rakubian’s neighbors, business associates, and individuals who might have cause to do him harm. No leads so far. Nothing to indicate accident, voluntary disappearance, or foul play.

Cassie said, “It doesn’t seem possible he could have vanished without any trace.”

“Happens more often than you might think,” Macatee said. “Fifty thousand disappearances in this country every year. Men, women, children. Across the board when it comes to social and financial status, race, religion, age. Known reasons, too. David Rakubian’s case isn’t so unusual.”

“How likely is it he’ll be found?”

“Depends. If it was voluntary and he covered his tracks well enough, odds are he’ll stay lost unless he decides to resurface on his own. If he was a victim of violence, evidence of it may turn up sooner or later. It’s not as easy to dispose of a dead body as people think.”

Not unless you’re very, very lucky .

They showed Macatee the evidence box, the dossier Hollis had brought home from the office. He sifted through the letters, cards, poems, time logs; listened to two tapes at random. Hollis watched him closely the entire time. Macatee’s expression remained neutral, but there seemed to be compassion in the brown-wound eyes when he looked at Cassie. He asked if he could take the dossier and several other items along with him, wrote out a receipt, thanked them for their cooperation, and left them alone. The interview had lasted little more than an hour.

Hollis was convinced that if Macatee had any suspicions, they were without any real basis. Fishing in the dark. Perhaps even doing no more than going through the motions. The dossier, the tapes and letters, confirmed what a sick bastard Rakubian had been. Could a cop who’d seen all sorts of human misery honestly care what happened to a wife abuser and stalker, as long as he stayed missing? Hollis didn’t see how. The inspector had struck him as a good man; if anything, he had to be on their side.

Monday Night

He had the dream for the first time that night. There had been others in the past nine days, disturbing but vague and jumbled, and he recalled little of them afterward. This one was vivid, murky in background but sharp in every detail, as if it were a terror-laced memory or precognition.

He was walking in a formless place of shapes and shadows. Wary but not frightened. Ahead he saw a wall, and as he neared it an opening appeared. He walked through the opening and found himself in a cave with wooden walls and a concrete floor. He stood looking down at the floor’s smooth black surface. And as he looked, cracks began to form there, to lengthen and widen, and the fear came in a rush as the concrete crumbled. A hand reached up through one of the cracks, fingers clawing toward him, then the entire arm, a shoulder, a head — Rakubian’s shattered head, Rakubian’s face grinning in a savage rictus. Then, like a bloody monolith, dripping dirt and fragments of rotting skin, all of the dead man rose up out of the broken floor and started toward him, whispering his name. He tried to run, stood rooted, and the clawed fingers closed bonily around his throat—

He jerked awake damp and shaking, his breathing clogged. Only a dream, a nightmare, but it remained hot and clear in his mind. He could still see Rakubian’s face, the death’s-head grin, the bulging eyes; still feel the pressure of those skeletal fingers. His throat ached as if the strangulation had been real.

There was no sleep for him after that; he lay staring blindly into the darkness. And the feeling that crept over him was as strong and irrefutable as any he’d ever experienced. A product of the dream, of guilt filtered through his subconscious... but he could not make himself believe it. The feeling was too visceral, too intense to be easily dismissed.

He and Eric weren’t safe. None of them were.

Somehow, someway, Rakubian was still a threat to them all.

Thursday

Angela and Kenny came home two days after the Fourth of July holiday.

They had exchanged daily e-mails with her, and as time passed she’d grown less afraid of Rakubian’s sudden reappearance and more willing to end her voluntary exile. Finally she’d agreed to set the Fourth as her own independence day. And stood by that decision when the time came, packing Kenny into her Geo early on the morning of the fifth. The little car rattled into their driveway just before dusk on the sixth.

The six long, difficult weeks of radiation therapy had made Hollis listless and depressed. Now that they’d ended, and he was no longer quite so fatigued or prone to sudden attacks of diarrhea, he had begun to regain both stamina and optimism; he’d gone back to work for the first time just before the holiday. Angela’s and Kenny’s safe return was just what he needed to boost his spirits, energize him.

She looked good. Smiling often again, the haggard look erased, the fear reduced to a shriveled presence deep in her eyes. Not her old self yet by any stretch; it would take time for a complete healing. But she was alive again, and seeing that made it a little easier to live with what he and Eric had done that Saturday in May.

Cassie had been right about his conscience: no matter how many rationalizations he used to erect a protective wall, his guilt and his knowledge of Eric’s continued to breach it. Doubts, nightmares, sleeplessness... they all plagued him. He was a changed man, forever changed. His sins, actual and intended, would torment him to one degree or another until the day he died.

That was the way it was for him, but evidently not for Eric. There had been no indication over the past several weeks that his conscience was tearing him up. On the phone today, bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t be there to welcome Angela and Kenny in person, he’d sounded happy and secure. The summer job he’d taken with a respected engineering firm in Santa Barbara was working out well; he bragged about an active love life, too. The seemingly too easy adjustment troubled Hollis. He wished they weren’t being kept apart by the summer work and his cancer treatments. If he could see his son in person he’d be better able to judge his mental state, and to broach the anger management subject.

He’d talked to Inspector Macatee four times since his May visit, playing the role of worried parent checking for any new information. There’d been none to be concerned about. Rakubian’s law offices had been closed at the end of June, the secretary gone two weeks before that, the paralegal hanging on until there was nothing left for her to do. Angela, in her divorce suit, had waived all rights to community property in perpetuity, so Rakubian’s house would remain closed up, his possessions untouched, until the bank that held the mortgage eventually foreclosed for nonpayment. Otherwise, the status was unchanged. Macatee had lost interest — it was in his quiet cop’s voice. He had other missing persons cases to deal with, dozens of them; Rakubian’s had been back-burnered, soon enough would be relegated to an inactive file and forgotten.