70

FRIDAY, 9:00 PM

SOPHIE WAS TERRIFIED of thunderstorms. Jessica knew where she’d gotten it, too. It was genetic. When Jessica was small, she used to hide under the steps at their house on Catharine Street whenever it thundered. If it got really bad, she used to crawl under the bed. Sometimes she would bring a candle. Until the day she set the mattress on fire.

They had eaten dinner in front of the television again. Jessica had been too tired to object. It didn’t matter anyway. She had picked at her food, disinterested in such a routine event when her world was cracking at the seams. Her stomach churned with the events of the day. How could she have been so wrong about Patrick?

Was she wrong about Patrick?

The images of what had been done to these young women would not leave her alone.

She checked the answering machine. There were no messages.

Vincent was staying with his brother. She picked up the phone and dialed the number. Well, two-thirds of it. Then she put the phone down.

Shit.

She did the dishes by hand, just to give her hands something to do. She poured a glass of wine, poured it out. She made a cup of tea, let it get cold.

Somehow, she’d made it until Sophie’s bedtime. Outside, thunder and lightning raged. Inside, Sophie was scared.

Jessica had tried all the usual remedies. She had offered to read her a story. No luck. She had asked Sophie if she wanted to watch Finding Nemo again. No luck. She didn’t even want to watch The Little Mermaid. This was rare. Jessica had offered to color her Peter Cottontail coloring book with her (no), offered to sing Wizard of Oz songs (no), offered to put decals on the colored eggs in the kitchen (no).

In the end, she just tucked Sophie into bed and sat with her. Every time there was a crack of thunder, Sophie looked at her as if it were the end of the world.

Jessica tried to think of anything but Patrick. So far, she had been unsuccessful.

There was a knock at the front door. It was probably Paula.

“I’ll be right back, sweetie.”

“No, Mom.”

“I won’t be more than—”

The power flickered off, then back on.

“That’s all we need.” Jessica stared at the table lamp as if she could will it to stay on. She held Sophie’s hand. The kid had her in a death grip. Mercifully, the lights stayed on. Thank you, Lord. “Mommy just has to answer the door. It’s Paula. You want to see Paula, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Gonna be okay?”

Sophie nodded, despite the fact that her lips were trembling.

Jessica kissed Sophie on the forehead, handed her Jools, her little brown bear. Sophie shook her head. Jessica then grabbed Molly, the beige one. Nope. It was hard to keep track. Sophie had good bears and bad bears. She finally said yes to Timothy, the panda.

“Be right back.”

“Okay.”

She walked down the stairs as the doorbell rang once, twice, three times. It didn’t sound like Paula.

“All right already,” she said.

She tried to look through the beveled glass in the door’s small window. It was pretty well fogged over. All she saw were the parking lights of the EMS van across the street. It seemed that even typhoons didn’t deter Carmine Arrabiata from having his weekly heart attack.

She opened the door.

It was Patrick.

Her first instinct was to slam the door. She resisted. For the moment. She glanced out at the street, looking for the surveillance car. She didn’t see it. She didn’t open the storm door.

“What are you doing here, Patrick?”

“Jess,” he said. “You’ve got to listen to me.”

The anger began to rise, dueling with her fears. “See, that’s the part you don’t seem to understand,” she said. “I really don’t.”

“Jess. Come on. It’s me.” He stamped from one foot to the other. He was thoroughly soaked.

“Me? Who the hell is me? You treated every one of these girls,” she said. “It didn’t occur to you to come forward with this information?”

“I see a lot of patients,” Patrick said. “You can’t expect me to remember them all.”

The wind was loud. Howling. They were both almost yelling to be heard.

“Bullshit. These were all within the last year.”

Patrick looked at the ground. “Maybe I just didn’t want to . . .”

“What, get involved? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Jess. If you could just—”

“You shouldn’t be here, Patrick,” she said. “This puts me in a really awkward situation. Go home.”

“My God, Jess. You don’t really think I had anything to do with these, these . . .”

It was a good question, Jessica thought. In fact, it was the question.

Jessica was just about to answer when a crack of thunder boomed, and the power browned out. The lights flickered on, off, on.

“I . . . I don’t know what to think, Patrick.”

“Give me five minutes, Jess. Five minutes, and I’ll go.”

Jessica saw the world of pain in his eyes.

“Please,” he said. He was soaking wet, pitiful in his pleading.

Crazily, she thought about her weapon. It was in the hall closet upstairs, top shelf, where it always was. She was actually thinking about her weapon, and whether she could get to it in time if needed.

Because of Patrick.

None of this seemed real.

“Can I at least come inside?” he asked.

There was no point in arguing. She cracked open the storm door as a sheer column of rain swept through. Jessica opened the door fully. She knew that there was a team on Patrick even if she didn’t see the car. She was armed and she had backup.

Try as she did, she just couldn’t believe Patrick was guilty. This wasn’t some crime of passion they were talking about, some moment of insanity when he lost his temper and went too far. This was the systematic, cold-blooded murder of six people. Maybe more.

Give her a piece of forensic evidence, and then she’d have no choice.

Until then . . .

The power went out.

Upstairs, Sophie wailed.

“Jesus Christ,” Jessica said. She looked across the street. Some of the houses still seemed to have power. Or was that candlelight?

“Maybe it’s the circuit breaker,” Patrick said, walking inside, walking past her. “Where’s the panel?”

Jessica looked at the floor, hands on hips. This was all too much.

“Bottom of the basement stairs,” she said, resigned. “There’s a flashlight on the dining room table. But don’t think that we—”

“Mommy!” from upstairs.

Patrick took off his raincoat. “I’ll check the panel, then I’m gone. I promise.”

Patrick grabbed the flashlight and headed to the basement.

Jessica shuffled her way to the steps in the sudden darkness. She headed upstairs, entered Sophie’s room.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Jessica said, sitting on the edge of the bed. Sophie’s face looked tiny and round and frightened in the gloom. “Do you want to come downstairs with Mommy?”

Sophie shook her head.

“You sure?”

Sophie nodded. “Is Daddy here?”

“No, honey,” Jessica said, her heart sinking. “Mommy’s . . . Mommy’s going to get some candles, okay? You like candles.”

Sophie nodded again.

Jessica left the bedroom. She opened the linen closet next to the bathroom, felt her way through the box that held the hotel soaps and sample shampoos and conditioners. She remembered when she used to take long, luxurious bubble baths with scented candles scattered around the bathroom, back in the stone age of her marriage. Sometimes Vincent would join her. Somehow it seemed like someone else’s life at the moment. She found a pair of sandalwood candles. She took them out of the box, returned to Sophie’s room.

Of course, there were no matches.

“I’ll be right back.”

She went downstairs to the kitchen, her eyes somewhat adjusted to the dark. She rummaged in the junk drawer for some book matches. She found a pack. Matches from her wedding. She could feel the gold embossed JESSICA AND VINCENT on the glossy cover. Just what she needed. If she believed in such things, she might imagine that there was a conspiracy afoot to drag her into some deep depression. She turned to head back upstairs when there was a slash of lightning and the sound of shattering glass.

She jumped at the impact. A branch had finally snapped off the dying maple next to the house and smashed in the window in the back door.

“Oh, this just gets better and better,” Jessica said. The rain swept into the kitchen. There was broken glass everywhere. “Son of a bitch.”

She got out a plastic trash bag from under the sink and some pushpins from the kitchen corkboard. Fighting the wind and gusting rain, she tacked the bag around the opening in the door, trying not to cut herself on the shards that remained.

What the hell was next?

She looked down the stairs into the basement, saw the Maglite beam dancing about the gloom.

She grabbed the matches and headed into the dining room. She looked through the drawers in the hutch, found a variety of candles. She lit half a dozen or so, placing them around the dining room and the living room. She headed back upstairs and lit the two candles in Sophie’s room.

“Better?” she asked.

“Better,” Sophie said.

Jessica reached out, dried Sophie’s cheeks. “The lights will be on in a little while. Okay?”

Sophie nodded, thoroughly unconvinced.

Jessica looked around the room. The candles did a fairly good job of exorcising the shadow monsters. She tweaked Sophie’s nose, got a minor giggle. She just got to the top of the stairs when the phone rang.

Jessica stepped into her bedroom, answered.

“Hello?”

She was met with an unearthly howl and hiss. Through it, barely: “It’s John Shepherd.”

He sounded as if he was on the moon. “I can barely hear you. What’s up?”

“You there?”

“Yes.”

The phone line crackled. “We just heard from the hospital,” he said.

“Say again?” Jessica said. The connection was horrible.

“Want me to call on your cell?”

“Okay,” Jessica said. Then she remembered. The cell was in the car. The car was in the garage. “No, that’s okay. Go ahead.”

“We just got a report back on what Lauren Semanski had in her hand.”

Something about Lauren Semanski. “Okay.”

“It was part of a ballpoint pen.”

“A what?”

“She had a broken ballpoint pen in her hand,” Shepherd shouted. “From St. Joseph’s.”

Jessica heard this clearly enough. She didn’t want to. “What do you mean?”

“It had the St. Joseph’s logo and address on it. The pen is from the hospital.”

Her heart grew cold in her chest. It couldn’t be true. “Are you sure?”

“No doubt about it,” Shepherd said. His voice was breaking up. “Listen . . . the surveillance team lost Farrell . . . Roosevelt is flooded all the way to—”

Quiet.

“John?”

Nothing. The phone line was dead. Jessica toggled the button on the phone. “Hello?”

She was met with a thick black silence.

Jessica hung up, stepped over to the hallway closet. She glanced down the stairs. Patrick was still in the basement.

She reached inside the closet, onto the top shelf, her mind spinning.

He’s been asking about you, Angela had said.

She slipped the Glock out of the holster.

I was on my way to my sister’s house in Manayunk, Patrick had said, not twenty feet from Bethany Price’s still-warm body.

She checked the weapon’s magazine. It was full.

His doctor came to see him yesterday, Agnes Pinsky had said.

She slammed the magazine home, chambered a round. And began to descend the stairs.

 

THE WIND CONTINUED TO BAY outside, trembling the windowpanes in their cracked glazing.

“Patrick?”

No response.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, padded across the living room, opened the drawer in the hutch, grabbed the old flashlight. She pushed the switch. Dead. Of course. Thanks, Vincent.

She closed the drawer.

Louder: “Patrick?”

Silence.

This was getting out of control really fast. She wasn’t going into the cellar without light. No way.

She backed her way to the stairs, then made her way up as silently as she could. She would take Sophie and some blankets, bundle her up to the attic, and lock the door. Sophie would be miserable, but she would be safe. Jessica knew she had to get control of herself, and the situation. She would lock Sophie in, get to her cell phone, and call for backup.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “It’s okay.”

She picked up Sophie, held her tight. Sophie shivered. Her teeth chattered.

In the flickering candlelight, Jessica thought she was seeing things. She had to be mistaken. She picked up a candle, held it close.

She wasn’t mistaken. There, on Sophie’s forehead, was a cross made of blue chalk.

The killer wasn’t in the house.

The killer was in the room.