She drove home and put the teakettle on. Moonlight fell in icy squares on all the polished surfaces. The violet flowers on the dining-room table looked real until you touched them; they were made of fabric and coated with dust. Her mother’s collection of yard-sale lamps gave the place its nostalgic glow.
Natalie took her cup of peppermint tea into the living room, sat at her desk, opened her laptop, then stared at the blank screen. Her fingers were shaking. She closed her eyes and watched vivid bursts of color painting the surfaces of her eyelids. It looked like an iridescent butterfly. She bit her lower lip and tried not to cry. Her face grew feverish. Her thoughts would not stop spinning.
The stick. The dead raccoon.
She logged on to the National Crime Information Center’s database. The NCIC kept track of sex offenders, fugitives, repeat offenders, gang members, and terrorism. All across the country, the distinguishing body marks of criminals, such as tattoos, moles, birthmarks, and scars, were photographed as part of the booking process. However, as Natalie had discovered, the procedure wasn’t universally enforced. Record-keeping errors were common, and older files could get lost, misplaced, or destroyed by fires. Also, the state databases weren’t organized in the most efficient manner, either. There were categories for criminals and categories for victims, but it was impossible to make a positive ID if the keywords hadn’t been entered properly.
You never knew how many incarcerated individuals had birthmarks until you searched through the national and state databases. Thousands upon thousands. It wasn’t easy coming up with a list that fit the specific variables. Besides, nothing would help if the perp hadn’t been registered in the first place. If Natalie’s attacker had led a quiet life under the radar, she’d never find him in any of the databases.
Now she drew a troubled breath. She’d been searching for the bogeyman ever since she was a rookie cop. She’d tracked down a few promising candidates, but nothing had ever come of it. Not that she wanted to reopen old wounds. She kept trying to put it behind her, but this recent spate of violence brought it all screaming back. The attack in the woods had changed her on a primal level. It made her want to save the world. It made her strong. It made her believe in monsters.
Now she opened the menu, chose her selections, then keyed in the variables and cross-references, including race, sex, and age of the criminal. At the time of the attack, the boy was approximately five foot ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, eighteen or nineteen, perhaps older. Today, he would profile as a male Caucasian, thirty-five to forty-five. She left a lot of blanks: no name, no DOB, no hair or eye color. Just the distinctive birthmark—a port-wine-colored butterfly on the inner left arm.
Her last promising lead had occurred two years ago. Stewart Rawlins was a barrel-chested ex-con in a motorcycle jacket and straight-leg jeans. Late thirties. Cagey eyes. A natural-born bullshit artist. According to the NICC, he had a port-wine-colored birthmark on his arm. The description was vague enough to capture her imagination—a four-leaf clover. Four-leaf clovers were similar to butterflies in some people’s eyes. Plus, he fit the general profile, so Natalie tracked him down on her off-hours. He lived in a village north of Albany, just a freckle on the map. She staked him out as if she were working undercover. She followed him into a bar one night and deliberately got him drunk.
Rawlins had distracting spaces between his teeth and comb-over hair you could see his glistening scalp through. At some point, the motorcycle jacket came off, revealing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and two fleshy arms leaning against the bar, but the geography of the birthmark wasn’t the same. Rawlins was not the man she was looking for, and Natalie promptly left the bar. He followed her out the door, hollering, “Hey! Come back! Was it something I said?” She drove home feeling defeated that night, vowing never to put herself into such a bizarre situation again.
Now she couldn’t resist. She hit Enter, and a list came onscreen. She selected Most Recent, but nothing new came up. She checked her watch and realized she was no longer officially on-call. Detective Augie Vickers would be taking over. She could relax. Maybe take a couple of sleeping pills tonight.
She felt ashamed of her feelings, which overwhelmed her occasionally. She hated the bogeyman, and yet he’d become such an alluring target. She couldn’t stop thinking about him during her weakest moments; she wanted to catch him, fiercely; she wanted to catch the butterfly and kill it. She wanted to squash it flat, obliterating her bad dreams once and for all. The thought of it infuriated and excited her all at once.
She powered down her computer and went upstairs. She stood in the shower stall and scrubbed herself raw with a nailbrush—trying to rid herself of the last few molecules of the crime scene. Of Daisy. She closed her eyes, and a cluster of falling stars burst across her field of vision.
She toweled off, got dressed for bed, and swallowed two sleeping pills with a glass of tepid water. The house lights cast crawly shadows. She gazed out her bedroom window at the clamoring darkness across the street, where trees tossed lazily in the wind. Traffic was sparse on her dead-end road. Nothing supernatural lurked in those woods—even though, whenever the moon slipped behind the clouds, the landscape became bathed in mystery.
A heavy silence filled the house. Her thoughts grew stagnant. She went to bed and closed her eyes. Tomorrow was Daisy’s funeral.