Andrew Gross - Eyes Wide Open

“I’m not laughing.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I know. That’s my problem.”

“Can I see them?” I asked. “These knife marks.”

“Not in the cards.”

“I just thought it might help. To confirm what you thought you saw. So where were they?” I asked. “On the body?”

Sherwood picked up and tapped his pencil. “On the underside of the victim’s tongue.”

“Oh…” The feeling snaked through me that I had stepped in something bad. Houvnanian. His victims carved with symbols. Blood all over the walls. Zorn.

Charlie.

“You have to look into this, Sherwood.”

He pushed the articles back to me. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, doc.”

“Someone, maybe this woman, Susan Pollack, may have had something to do with Evan’s death.”

“There’s nothing tying her into anything, doc. Your nephew still went up on the rock. He jumped off. Or damn well fell while attempting to.” He looked at me unwaveringly.

“You told me no one would talk to me over at homicide. And maybe no one gives a shit about Evan,” I said, “but they damned well might give one about Zorn.”

“Look…” He glanced at his watch. “I got things to do. And you, you’re supposed to be on a plane. Right? ”

I looked back at him unwaveringly. “You really think I’m going anywhere until this is resolved?”

The detective stared at me a long time before he threw the pencil back on his desk and shook his head. “Anyone ever tell you, doc, you make it awfully hard for someone to like you?”

I shrugged. “My wife says it all the time.”

He stood up and grabbed his jacket. “Yeah, well your wife knows what she’s talking about on this one.”

I said I’d call him the next day. And the day after that. Until he looked into the possibility of what those cuts meant.

And until he checked out Susan Pollack.

“I know, I know…,” I said with a smile. “Don’t wait by the phone.”

K athy called when I got in the car. I had just pushed off a procedure on the daughter of a friend. Now I was pushing for a few days more. Her patience was running thin. Mine might have been too, if the situation was reversed.

“It’s time to come home, Jay.”

I didn’t answer for a second. I wasn’t exactly sure how to. “I can’t, Kath. I just can’t.”

“What the hell is going on out there, Jay? This is beginning to scare me a little now. I’m sorry about what happened to Evan. My heart goes out to Charlie and Gabby. It really does… But people need you here. It’s time to come back.”

“I can’t, Kath.” I sucked in a sharp breath without explaining.

“You can’t? ” There was an edge to her tone.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road. “I’ve just found out a few things. And it’s hard to explain. Especially right now.”

“Well, try, Jay. Try! You’ve been there almost a week. So please, try…”

There was about the toughest silence I’d ever felt pass between us. Maybe twenty seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

I wanted to say, I love you, honey. You know that. I need you. Especially right now.

But I just can’t tell you.

Until I knew for sure.

I saw something starting to open up. Something only I saw. Something only I could put together.

I flashed to Russell Houvnanian. To the time he’d been up to my dad’s.

And then to Evan. The flashing “eye” they had found in his pocket. The eerie knife marks on Walter Zorn’s tongue.

And finally to something I’d held back, from Charlie, from Sherwood.

And now, even from my wife.

The image of someone staring at me from their car the other night outside Charlie’s apartment. Their face obscured by the darkened glass.

I didn’t know for sure, but it all added up to me. Maybe only to me.

I thought I’d seen Susan Pollack.

And if I had, I knew what it meant.

It meant my nephew Evan had been murdered.

C harlie didn’t know what to do with the photos of Sherry’s gruesome murder.

He’d hidden them away-at the bottom of a drawer, with all his old music. And Evan’s sneaker.

He didn’t show them to Gabriella. They would only make her more distraught.

And he didn’t know what to make of them anyway. Or what they meant. Why would someone want to harm her? She was someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly. It was a message. After all these years. A message for him.

But what troubled him most was how they had even known where to find him.

His mind was jumbled, running wild with crazy thoughts and long-buried fears. Images he couldn’t put together or stop. The unsettling feeling that the walls of the past were closing in on him.

He was tired of hiding all these years. Tired of the fears, the guilt, the shame. Of having to protect his family.

From what?

Zorn knew of Evan. The old detective had played a role in Charlie’s past, more than thirty years before.

And Sherry-blond, sexy, free-as-a-butterfly Sherry-she was a part of that dark past too.

He sat there on the edge of his bed, head in his hands, afraid of where it was all going. Poor Evan… How he wished he could have him back. What hope was left for them now? Charlie knew his part would catch up with him someday. But Evan… Evan had been innocent. His innocent little boy.

Yet it had sucked him in too…

Charlie had let it.

And now the walls were closing in.

He went downstairs. Gabby was calling for the cat, putting out her food. “ Here, Juliet. Here, my baby…” She noticed Charlie. “The stupid cat is missing. I haven’t seen her all day. Maybe she misses Evan. Maybe she knows there’s nothing here for her anymore.”

“Maybe it’s time we moved on,” Charlie said, out of the blue.

“Move on? ” His words surprised her.

“Yes.” He was excited now. The thought of packing up and starting a new life seemed right. “Maybe we ought to get out of here… Go back to Miami. Or Vancouver. We know people there.”

“Vancouver…? ” Gabby chortled derisively. “Are you crazy, Charlie? That was twenty years ago. We just lost our son. We live on what the state gives us. We have to be here, Charlie. That rock has killed us. There is nowhere to go. Go where?”

He sat down and put his hands to his head, afraid to contemplate what might be happening. She was right. There was nowhere to go, only to wait. Wait for it to happen.

Go where?

“I don’t know.”

T he thing is…, Sherwood reflected as he parked his Gran Torino along the road in Morro Bay, in the shadow of the giant rock there:

He didn’t really buy into any of this: not the thirty-year-old connection to that ritual killing case; not the meeting between Walter Zorn and Evan Erlich; not the markings on Zorn’s tongue, which could be anything; not Dr. Erlich’s far-fetched suspicions about the Houvnanian woman who had recently been released from jail.

Yet he was here. Spending a day in the damp and wind when he could be working a case that actually needed his attention. Instead he was going over for the tenth time one he had already put to bed.

Explain that.

Since he’d gotten that stupid pastor’s liver he found himself doing a lot of things he didn’t fully understand.

A year back, he would’ve told this persistent doctor from back east to take his endovascular scope for a hike.

And hardly that nicely.

But somewhere in the closed bins of his mind, Sherwood had to acknowledge, something the guy was saying must have been making the tiniest bit of sense to him. It was the old 1 percent axiom-a detective’s rule, hijacked by the previous vice president: