Chapter Two
It began to snow again as Kathy reached the tan brick Colby Police Department building where Jack Glazier’s office was. She flashed her credentials at the unsmiling, bulky policewoman at the front desk and nodded to the officers she passed on the way through the bullpen to the senior detectives’ offices. They nodded back with a mixture of unease and politeness that she had come to expect from them. She got that reaction a lot from people who knew her profession. It was almost as if they thought the remnants of it—otherworldly bad mojo, curses, haunts, and evil—clung to her hair and clothes like smells or smoke, and that those intangible things might somehow poison their space or infect them if they got too close to her. Because of the possible outside chance that their fears were not superstition, she didn’t take their reactions personally.
Jack’s door was open, and Kathy found him sitting behind his desk. Teagan leaned on a corner of the desk, tossing and catching a glass paperweight, much to Jack’s tightly controlled dismay. Teagan smiled at her when she walked in, and she found herself smiling back. Oliver Morris sat in a chair across from Glazier. He offered her a small wave, and she tipped her chin at him in return.
“Hi, Kathy,” Jack said. “Get here okay?”
“Sure,” Kathy said, sitting in the remaining empty chair next to Morris. “Long early-morning drives are my reason for living. So what’ve we got here?”
“Well, let’s not waste any more time with pleasantries,” Jack said with a small smile. He slid the file across the desk to her. She leafed through Jack’s and Teagan’s notes and read over Cordwell’s report, then leaned back in the chair as she studied the crime scene photos. There was a photo of a chunk of wood with runes carved into it. She recognized most of them as an archaic language rarely seen, even in occult circles.
“Can you read that?” Jack asked.
“Yeah,” Kathy answered after a moment. “Yeah, most of it. Hmmm. . . this is all . . . names. Places. Invocations to gods to protect the soul while it travels to the realms beyond ours. This was in the guy’s pocket? That’s usually a voluntary thing, not something to be left behind with a sacrificial body. Of course, these specific names are significant entities and locations primarily worshiped by the Hand of the Black Stars cult, so it’s likely some perversion of the usual occult rites.”
“Who?”
“Bad folks. Big trouble. They are the kind of ‘church’ that makes LaVey’s satanists look like potluck-and-PTA moms. It’s a twisted derivation of chaos magic rituals with significance placed on patterns and fractals as the basis of sigils which can—”
She had come across the crime scene photo showing a close-up of the symbol that had been burned into the John Doe’s back.
“What is it, love?”
“It’s . . . this. This sigil,” Kathy said to Teagan. “I’ve seen it before.”
“What does it mean?” Jack leaned in to take another look at it.
“I know it’s believed to be very powerful, but I’ll have to get back to you on the particulars of how. For now, what it gives us is a confirmation that this isn’t some amateur goth kid dipping a black-painted toenail into the occult. This sigil would only be recognized, let alone used, by someone very experienced. And, I’d be willing to guess, someone with the kind of agenda followed by the Hand of the Black Stars. An indication,” she said, looking up from the file, “that your John Doe is probably not going to be the only body.”
Jack exhaled slowly. “Okay. I think the mayor was afraid of that. So you and I are heading up this task force, Kat. Mayor’s request. My understanding from the captain is that we should defer to you on occult aspects. You let us do the heavy lifting.”
Kathy nodded.
“Morris,” Jack said to the young man next to her. “You dig up what you can about related deaths from exposure or animal attacks, or both. Start with just this county. Oh, and add any missing persons in the last two weeks to the search. Teagan, we need an ID on the John Doe.”
“Challenge me,” Teagan responded with a grin.
“Kathy—” Jack began.
She was already on her feet and halfway to the door, waving the photo of the sigil. She turned. “I’ve got a connection I can talk to.”
“An informant?”
Kathy paused and met Jack’s eyes. “You could call him that. If anyone knows what the HBS is up to or where to find them, it’ll be him.” She paused a moment, her expression clouded, then added, “And he owes me.”
“Okay, good. If Teagan doesn’t turn up anything, we’ll follow up with missing persons and cold cases, see if we have any possible leads there. We’ll all check in at seven p.m., back here. And gang,” Jack added, “stay safe.”
* * *
Kathy’s drive up to Newlyn was frustratingly slow going; the snow was getting worse, coming down in thick, fluffy flakes that blurred the road in front of and around her in white. She passed by a blue sedan with a crumpled front and a badly dented tan minivan that had, ostensibly, collided and then slid off the highway and into a ditch in the wide, snowy median. Both vehicles were flanked by cop cars, and an ambulance was slowly making its way up the shoulder. The blue car reminded her of her brother’s old clunker, the one he had used to pick up co-eds and—
Kathy forced herself to exhale the breath in her chest. It was hard enough to make out the lane’s dividing lines without her mind scratching at old wounds (she reached up and touched her scar without realizing it) and stirring up old ghosts.
Of course, she knew herself well enough to know that forcing those memories out of her head wasn’t going to work. It never had—not when her mind was made up to work through a thing. And she supposed there was still a lot about her brother she needed to work through.
She had come to find that it was common for families of serial killers and mass murderers to feel the same things she did—dumbfoundedness at the loved one’s capacity for predatory viciousness, guilt that they hadn’t known sooner or hadn’t seen it coming—or worse, that they had seen all the signs, all the pieces of their puzzle, but hadn’t put them together, and so had never seen the emergence of one hell of an ugly picture.
For Kathy, it had taken accidentally finding Toby’s trophy box to finally understand what her brother was.
* * *
It had been a sweltering Pennsylvania summer night when Kathy had found the little wooden jewelry box, a night dense with the sounds of crickets and frogs chirping and small, furry, restless animals rustling in the tall grasses. The air hung thick with the day’s unspent and relentless heat, too heavy to stir more than a sluggish breeze. Kathy remembered thinking later that the heat must have somehow gotten into Toby’s brain, cooking it, blazing sense and sensitivity out of him. She’d thought then that it had to be something hot and hostile from the outside that had snaked its way in, had clawed into him and had eaten up the insides of the Toby she knew and loved. That Toby couldn’t have done those things; something had to have gotten into him. It had to have been buzzing around inside him and the heat had baked it into his thoughts, smoking some kind of crazy out to the surface.
She and Toby had been close as kids, especially after Mom died. Her death had been hard for Kathy, but it had been devastating for Toby. He and Dad had never gotten along—had even come to blows, or close to them at times—and Toby, who had never been particularly good with people, had needed someone. He’d chosen Kathy with a fiercely exclusive devotion, and she had done her best to mother him in the ways she thought he needed. But the relationship grew stranger as they got older. It was wildly uneven, for one thing. His need for her seemed all-consuming at times. He could be possessive and overprotective. His looks and sometimes the casual ways in which he played around with her seemed to her an awkward and uncomfortable combination of filial and even sexual, rather than fraternal, love. At other times, he was unsettlingly cruel and angry, or utterly distracted and almost indifferent to her, a state which seemed to increase as puberty took full hold of him. She’d never been afraid of his moods before, but when he was around sixteen or seventeen, it seemed to Kathy that a switch had been flipped in him, and all warmth toward her had been shut off. It made her acutely uncomfortable. From that point on, intense anger or stony indifference alternately seemed to saturate his every move, look, and word. And it wasn’t just with her. In fact, it appeared that Toby had abandoned the idea of human connection and interaction altogether. At least, that’s what she’d thought.
By the time he was nineteen, she’d taken to avoiding his sullen, hulking form around the house. He’d lost his job, which had ruined his chances of moving out, a setback that seemed to stoke a barely controlled rage in him. She avoided conversation about him too, with perhaps well-meaning, or possibly just rubbernecking, friends and acquaintances who also found Toby’s presence discomforting.
By the time he had turned twenty-one, he was never home. He used to tell her and Dad that he was going to the bar. She remembered thinking he spent a lot of time at the bar for someone with no known friends around town, and that maybe all that drinking was what was changing his mood and his personality. Toby could be cruel and aggressive and he could even be creepy . . . but she’d had no reason to think he was a liar. She hadn’t known then about the Hand of the Black Stars cult or her brother’s late-night drives around their rural little hometown. She hadn’t known about his stalking, stabbing, and engaging in a host of pet paraphilias. Most of that came out at his trial.
Ironically, she had found the news stories about the dead girls from all over the county morbidly intriguing, given the unusual consistencies. There were carvings on the bodies, and each of them was missing at least one finger. Even then, she’d known about modus operandi and signatures from TV, although crime scenes and the people who made them were little more than a passing interest for her back then. She was only seventeen, and cute boys, books, guns, and music more often grabbed her attention. She hadn’t had much reason to look further into the disappearances and murders of those girls back then. It was a problem for outside, faceless others, to be dealt with by different outside, faceless others.
It was not a jewelry box on a shelf in the back of her brother’s closet—not then.
The problem had been that she hadn’t done laundry. She hated it—mostly the lugging of the baskets of clothes up and down the stairs, and the heavy, uncomfortably cold weight of wet clothes as she tried to hang them up. She’d done a lot of cleaning that day, and she was hot and tired and in no mood to do a load of laundry just to have something to sleep in. Toby had T-shirts—long ones she could borrow to use as nightgowns. He’d never miss one if she took it then, while he was out. He’d never even notice.
So that hot, unbearably sticky summer night, Kathy had padded into Toby’s room in her underwear and had opened the door to the closet to rifle through his clothes. She slid his dress shirts out of the way, as well as some jackets and sweaters. None of his T-shirts were hung up, which, given Toby’s own laundry habits, made sense in a way. She shoved things around a bit, and suddenly there they were—a hastily half-folded pile of old football jerseys and concert T-shirts on the upper closet shelf. Perfect.
She stood on tiptoe and reached up, feeling around for a soft one, and her fingers closed around a black Metallica shirt worn thin enough to be light and comfortable. As she pulled it down, though, something sharp-edged and hard fell with it, its corner bouncing painfully off her foot before breaking open and spilling its contents all over the floor. She swore under her breath, knowing he’d be pissed. He never seemed to notice her taking his T-shirts, but if he even thought she was breathing in the direction of his other possessions, especially those in his bedroom closet, he got livid.
She crouched down, sweeping the little spilled objects into a pile. If she could put them back before—
Kathy frowned. It had taken her a moment to realize what the little ivory things were. Even after, she tried not to let the idea that Toby had what looked like finger bones cause immediate concern.
Don’t overthink this, she told herself. No reason to overreact, just because Toby has bones in a box. But she couldn’t help remembering him yanking her away from the closet the other day, one fist tangled in her hair and another digging into her arm. He’d been so angry when he thought . . . what? He’d never said why he’d gotten so upset. She’d only been looking for the box of old family photos from when Mom was alive; she’d wanted to look through them and thought he might have them. She was going to ask first. In fact, she’d already had the query half out of her mouth as she reached the closet, but he’d flown off the bed and had practically thrown her to the floor. The look in his eyes had scared her. It wasn’t so much what was there as what wasn’t. He’d had shark’s eyes, dead empty, without recognition or empathy.
There are plenty of possible reasons for the bones, right? Right? She wasn’t sure, but she tried to think it through. She thought the little fetishes or whatever they were supposed to be were actually made of real bone and not something synthetic like plastic. They didn’t look or feel anything like that necklace of fake bones Toby had gotten for Mardi Gras last year. The texture, the color, even the weight of these bones was different—like the hip bone of the deer she’d once found out in the corn field at the edge of the woods. Even if they were real bones, though, that alone was no reason to cause that growing unease in the pit of her stomach. Animal bones, probably. Toby had always been interested in that sort of thing, animal bones and hides and hunting and all that. And okay, maybe the bones were even from an animal that had fingers, like a monkey, or . . . or a . . .
They’re human bones. The certainty rooted and made itself known before she could discount it. That little voice in her brain and that unease in her gut weren’t going to let her explain this away. They were real human bones, but from whom? Was Toby into grave digging now or something? Whose fingers could they possibly—
And then Kathy remembered the news articles, the ones about the murdered women. All those poor women, some of whose bodies were discovered not far from where she’d found that deer bone as a kid . . . all of them with fingers missing. And she felt sick.
A second later she had hastily dropped the bones back into the box, wiping her hands on her thighs with a vigorous distaste. Toby? A part of her resisted putting all the pieces together. It would mean Toby had done some horrible things, and well . . . he couldn’t have. Sure, he was moody, and he certainly had a temper, but the person who was doing all those killings was some kind of monster. After all, these women in the paper had been raped, mutilated, carved, stabbed, and dumped like trash in the woods. And their fingers ...
And that probably wasn’t the worst of it. She’d read somewhere that police always held back some of the details of the crime so that they could weed out the crazies who confessed to things they didn’t do. So there was probably more. The Toby she knew, as much of a dick as he could be, just wasn’t capable of such brutal things. Okay, so he was uncomfortably weird with her sometimes, the way he stared at her, at her body, with a kind of hungry, angry expression. But people had rough patches in life where they did things, maybe wanted things, that didn’t really define them, per se, that they eventually outgrew. Toby had lived most of his life in a rough patch, really. Then there was that old dog he’d said he found dead, and he’d told her he was only cutting into it to see what it was like on the inside—no worse than hunting, really, because he’d found it already dead. But people experimented, didn’t they? Dad said the boy needed an outlet for that temper of his....
He killed that dog, and you know it. You knew it then, the voice told her. He killed it like he killed those women.
No. Just no. No one related to her, with the same blood in his veins and the same DNA and the same formative childhood, could possibly do horrible things like that to other people.
So maybe Toby had found the box. Kathy picked it up gingerly, the tiny rattle of bones inside turning her stomach as she turned the box. Maybe he’d gone out on a long drive and then a walk in the woods and had come across it just lying there. Maybe.
Or maybe, that little voice in her head, so sure of itself, suggested, maybe he boiled the flesh off the finger bones of each of his murder victims and kept them as trophies so he could fantasize again and again about the kills. Maybe that was why he had yanked her so violently away from the closet. He hadn’t wanted her to find his little box of treasures.
She rose on unsteady legs, her shaking hands causing the contents of the box to knock around inside, and carefully made her way back to the closet. She’d put the box back where it had been, and . . . think. She’d think about what to do next. Maybe she could talk to Toby first and tell him what she’d seen. Maybe if she just asked, he could explain everything, and maybe that explanation had nothing at all to do with the local murders. Maybe there was a perfectly go—
A sharp pain at the back of her head made her cry out. Before she could register it as fingers tangled in her hair, pulling, the box had flown out of her hand, spilling the contents again, and she was on her back on the bedroom floor with Toby straddling her. The usual dead look in his eyes had been replaced by one of abject rage, not like fire but like an ice storm, a screaming, swirling maelstrom of hate.
It took her several moments longer to see the knife. It was shiny. Clean. It looked brand new. Its polished, silvery blade caught and froze time itself for what seemed like several long minutes before Toby’s distorted voice finally broke through.
“What. The FUCK. Are you doing?” His words dropped like stones from his mouth, each segmented phrase punctuated by his hand on her throat picking her up and knocking her head against the floor. He reeked of cheap whiskey.
“I—I,” she croaked. She couldn’t manage more than that. His hand was heavy, and she felt both words and breath forced back down inside her, causing the pounding of her heart to ache in her chest.
“Oh, Kat. Silly, stupid Kat.” He brought the point of the knife down very close to her widely staring eye. “You should have stayed out of my room.”
She struggled beneath his weight. “Toby, stop,” she gasped, trying to keep what little of her voice she could rasp out from rising an octave in panic.
He glanced back at the little box, its spilled insides vomited all over the bedroom floor, and eased his grip on her throat, just a little. When he looked back at her, his face wore a strange expression of disappointment and excitement. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Toby, get off me.” She coughed. “Get off me, come on! Get off or Dad will—”
Her head was rocked to the side by a blow that stung her cheek. He’d hit her. Holy fuck, he’d actually hit her. He’d taken his hand off her throat and slapped her hard in the face. She lay silent, too stunned to struggle or attempt to speak again. Her cheek throbbed, and hot tears blurred her vision.
“You know, I could do you right here. I’ve thought about it, you know. I could fuck you and stab you to pieces and drag whatever’s left of you out into the woods. I’d hide you better than the others. Dad would neeeever find you. No one would ever find you.“ His voice was soft, very soft, and kind of singsongy as he drew out the word “never.” He stroked the side of her breast through her bra with his free hand and grazed her bare stomach with the knife. “I could do that, Kat. I could make sure you keep quiet, so, so quiet, about the box and the finger bones and the Hand of the Black Stars—all of that. But you’re my sister. I don’t want to kill you—really, I don’t.”
He leaned down until he was lying on top of her, his groin grinding painfully against her hips, his lips close to her ear. She felt the knife point digging into her cheek, and she winced, fresh tears streaming out of the corners of her eyes.
“But damn,” he said, his breathing getting heavier, “do I ever want to cut you.” His erection pressed painfully hard into her hip.
“Toby, please. Please get off of me.”
He sat up again and raised the knife.
“Toby, don’t!”
He pressed the blade into her skin just above her left eyebrow. She could feel the sting of it, a spark of horrific bright pain, and she screamed.
He pulled the blade down, skipping over her eye and landing on her cheek just below the eye socket, a new sting that spread its venomous agony out across her face. She screamed again, all the panicked desperation inside her welling up in that one loud wail of terror and hurt.
He dragged the blade down farther, all the way to her jawbone, and now she could feel the wet heat of her own blood dripping down into her ear, her eye, her hair. Her tongue darted against the inside of her cheek and she felt it give a little, the skin there so thin, so dangerously close to tearing straight through, and she screamed again.
She barely heard the rapid footsteps on the stairs or her father and Officer Kempton shouting at Toby. She felt a weight being lifted off her and a coolness where it had been, and she began to tremble all over. She closed her eyes, bawling, and heard more shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. The pain throbbing across her face had a heartbeat of its own, and she had blood in her ear, and besides, her own sobs filled her from the inside out. So she cried on the floor, cried until she couldn’t hear the shouting or even her own sobs, just the furious pounding of her wound’s own heartbeat, until that, too, faded, and the darkness behind her eyelids spread to her whole body.
* * *
Kathy turned up Silver Street and followed it through acres of white flatland to the visitor parking lot just outside of Parker Hall. A red brick building with narrow, barred windows and a mansard roof, it had always struck Kathy as a stern, unwelcoming place, looming in the vertical and nearly suffocating in its lengths and turns. Unlike other mental hospitals in which Kathy had found occasion to visit in order to interview staff or patients, Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital, formerly Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane, was one large building with wards, dubbed “halls,” extending out from Parker Hall’s administrative offices in broad slants.
She parked and sat for several minutes, watching the snow gather on her windshield and slowly blot out her view of the hospital. It took every ounce of willpower inside her to make herself get out of the car. Once the cold hit her face, she found it a little easier to trudge through the snow to the front door.
Kathy pressed the intercom button and gave her full name, then flashed her credentials at the CCTV camera mounted above the front door. There was a click and a crackle on the other end, followed by a soul-jarring buzz as the front door was unlocked. Kathy left the blindingly bright cold behind and stepped into the main lobby.
Ahead and to the right, a middle-aged woman with coiffed blond hair, a tired mouth, and cool eyes magnified by thick glasses sat behind a glass wall in a small office. She waved Kathy over.
“Hey, Margaret,” Kathy said with a small smile as she approached. She held up her ID against the glass between them, then slid it beneath through a narrow opening above the wooden desk. Margaret was a stickler for visitor log-in protocol despite their familiarity, and Kathy had no issue with making sure the video recordings showed Margaret doing her job to the letter. Going through the familiar motions after so long, though, brought back a surprising surge of heavy old feelings.
Margaret smiled back, or rather, offered a curl of the mouth that passed for her smile, and returned Kathy’s ID, then handed her a laminated visitor’s pass on a lanyard with a clip. “Hello, Katherine. Long time no see. Are you here to see our new Mrs. Dorsey?”
“No, uh . . . actually, I’m here to, um, to see Toby.”
Margaret’s face remained professionally placid. She nodded, scribbling something on a clipboarded form, which she then handed to Kathy to sign. After Kathy had returned it, the older woman spoke again, softly. “You’ll find him in three-oh-five.”
Kathy tried to smile, but it slipped awkwardly off her face.
“Want an orderly to go with you?”
“Won’t be necessary,” Kathy said with a tone lighter than she felt. “Won’t be there long.”
Margaret seemed to think on that for a moment, perhaps considering Kathy’s scar. “Be careful, Katherine.”
“I will.”
Kathy turned before Margaret could see the pain in her eyes and made her way down the hall. There were three more doors, two that her visitor’s pass unlocked electronically and the last, which was opened for her by a guard armed with a Taser, before she reached the visiting area. She sat at the end of a long table that reminded her of high school lunchrooms and waited. A few minutes later, the same armed guard brought Toby in.
It had been a while since she had seen her brother. He looked smaller somehow, smaller than when he had loomed over her, smaller than he had when he had cut her—
She swallowed hard, avoiding his eyes, which she could feel fixed on her even from across the room. His blond hair had been cut short, almost military-style, and it bristled as he tilted his head. His arms and chest, once a well-built, worked-out source of pride beneath his tattoos, looked less bulky than she remembered. She didn’t suppose they let him have weights at the hospital, which probably drove him nuts. His wrists were handcuffed to each other and to a chain around his waist that also extended to cuffs around his ankles. Kathy made herself look at the youngish, good-looking face. Its pleasantness, and its resemblance to her own, were offset by a sneer of a mouth and cold blue shark’s eyes. Dead eyes, she thought, behind which the blackness that had entangled itself there had swallowed whatever had been her brother. The only spark of life or passion, of connectivity to the world, was when he hurt people. Like when he had hurt her.
He sat down across from her with a careless flop and a smirk and stared down at his fingers for several seconds—just long enough to make things uncomfortable—before finally speaking.
“So, little sister. After all this time, what brings you all the way out here to see me?”
Kathy leaned back in her chair. Her movements were slow, deliberate. Her wary gaze was fixed on him, while the rest of her face remained smooth and emotionless. “The Hand of the Black Stars.”
Toby’s eyes shot up to meet hers, his smirk suddenly gone. “Why do you want to know about them?” Before she could answer, a look of understanding bloomed in his eyes, and he nodded. “A case. So, this is a business call. They causing trouble for you somewhere?”
“Right here in Connecticut, as a matter of fact.”
“Colby?”
Kathy tilted her head, surprised. “How did you know?”
Toby smiled, but the look in those dead eyes reflected nothing but black. “The snow.”
“The snow? What does that have to do with anything?”
He stood and slid around the corner of the table, and she was reminded of how frightening he could be when he stood over her. Toby had been quick and very, very strong. She didn’t much like him being that close to her.
He reached out to touch her face and she flinched. He paused momentarily, giving her a small smile that could have meant a hundred different things, and gingerly traced the line of her scar with his pinkie finger.
“You look good, baby sister. Really good.”
Her hand clamped around his wrist like a vise, arresting both his touch and his smile. “We need to talk. You need to sit.”
They locked eyes for a moment, and Kathy was relieved to see that she’d garnered enough internal flint that even a predator like Toby recognized it and backed down. She let go of his wrist, and he retreated sullenly to his side of the table and sat.
“So let me guess,” he said, staring down at his fingers again. “You have a murder case you think the HBS is involved in. So . . . what? You come to pick the brain of your slavering, psychotic killer of a brother?”
“You know members of the Hand of the Black Stars. You mentioned them the night—you’ve mentioned them before. I need to know the meaning of a ritual—names, places, sigils.”
“Even though it’s only business, it’s still good to see you, Kat. Though I admit I’m surprised by this new cool serenity in you. Pleased, too. And with me in such close proximity to you. Self-help books, is it, or some kind of therapy?”
She leaned back in her chair. “I need answers, Toby. A man has been murdered.”
“Only one?” He chuckled dryly. “And I should care . . . why?”
She resisted the urge to sigh. “I don’t figure you do care.”
“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, baby sister? Couldn’t do what I did if any teeny-tiny part of me was capable of human feeling, right? But you and I both know there isn’t anything so weak and pointless as sentiment in me, because the Hand of the Black Stars touched me and burned it right out of my core.”
“Look, I’m not here to help you process your feelings—or the lack thereof. But whatever goes on inside you . . . it’s complicated. I know that.”
“Oh, do you? Well, how the hell is it, then?”
She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and gave in to the sigh. She tried again. “It’s like . . . wandering into a mirage. Or a memory. Some flat space, some echo of a moment that was or will be, but is never, ever where you are when you are. Everything—people talking and laughing, dancing, eating, working, fighting, fucking, moving along, moving through time and space—everything is happening around you and you’re in the center of it, but you’re not real, not really there. You’re just . . . superimposed on the world. At first, you want to know the secret, why everyone seems to know how to blend in and become part of the mirage, to find and connect to its physicality, its smells and tastes and colors, and make it real. But no one seems to understand why you can’t do it, and so no one knows how to tell you how it’s done. So you watch and crudely imitate and hope you’ll figure it out, but you don’t—you can’t—and it makes you angry. You stuff that anger down because it certainly isn’t going to help you blend in, and you bury it under your own secret ideas about what life and love and happiness should be, ideas that can’t help but be steeped in the anger in your head. With every social rejection, every reminder that you’re just a shadow on a mirage, you accumulate more and more of that anger, which settles and compresses and turns to hate. And that hate is the only other real thing in your layer with you, just you and your hate pasted onto a world that isn’t yours and doesn’t want to be. And when you’ve spent enough time pasted into someone else’s version of life with hate buoying you up most days, it starts to leak in little ways, to erupt sometimes. Whatever you were, the hate becomes what you are, what gives you definition and outline, and what ultimately simulates the kind of physicality you had been looking for all along. It isn’t enough, though, and maybe you know it never will be, but you’ve tasted the world, smelled it, touched it, heard it, all through that hate, and you can’t go back to being a ghost over a mirage, not ever again—not when you could be one more kill away from figuring it all out.”
“Stop,” Toby whispered. His eyes were wet with tears.
A cold, cruel part of her, a part that she supposed was just like him, said, “I’m good at what I do for a reason.”
“What do you want from me, Kat?”
“I told you—I want some information on the Hand of the Black Stars cult. Inside information that you have.”
“How do you know I have any information at all?”
She fixed a stare on him that betrayed nothing of her feelings except impatience. “They didn’t make you what you are—you did. But they did get inside you. They validated you and your killing, facilitated it. They protected you. So you became one of them. It was a blood bond. They know your secrets, and you know theirs.”
Toby sighed, scratching at his elbow. He had many long, raw red scratches up and down his forearms, though his nails were cut short. Kathy didn’t want to imagine how her brother had managed those marks, or why.
She glanced at the tattoo on his right bicep, a black symbol in a rounded hexagon surrounded by runes. She had seen it countless times as a teen but had never attached any significance to it until after Toby’s arrest. It was not quite as complex as the one carved into the John Doe, but it was very, very close. It had many of the same occult significations, understood only by the initiated.
The Hand of the Black Stars had been mentioned briefly during Toby’s trial, probably more for sensationalist reasons than factual evidence, as a possible influence in Toby’s killings. Little was proven in that regard. Little was ever proven when it came to the cult, including solid evidence of its existence. But Kathy had no doubt that Toby knew and had always known more about the Hand of the Black Stars than anyone she had ever met. They had nurtured a killer in their midst, not just because it benefited Toby to be protected, but because it benefited them, too. He could be an instrument, if guided in their ways. Kathy thought that, on some level, Toby knew that; his loyalty to them, much like their loyalty to him, went only so far as the self-serving interests of a predator would allow.
Finally, Toby spoke. “What do you want to know?”
“Where I can find them.”
Toby leaned back, considering her request. “Well, there’s a sect in Oregon, moved up from California. One in Maine. Alaska, Ohio, Oklahoma. There was one in Jersey, but they’re all gone now.” He waved a hand. “They all vanished. Not even the priests know what happened. And . . . yeah, there’s one in Connecticut, but I’m not sure exactly where. Colby sounds about right.” He smiled.
Kathy wasn’t sure if her brother was being honest about what he didn’t know, but what he did reveal matched with her own knowledge of the cult. She decided to push on. She produced the crime scene photo with the symbol that had been branded on the John Doe‘s back. Hesitant to give him the satisfaction of viewing death on glossy paper, she nevertheless slid the photo over to her brother.
“What does this symbol mean?”
Her brother leaned forward, studied it a moment, finger-traced it with a kind of reverence, and leaned back again, sailing the photo back across the table to her. “It’s a key.”
“A key to what?”
“A door.”
It was maddening, letting Toby drag out the conversation like that, just to keep her there. Still, it was, frankly, the most productive conversation she’d had with him since they’d been kids.
“What door?”
“Look, baby sister. I don’t think all the visiting hours in the world are enough time to explain the ins and outs of the Hand’s belief system.”
“Try. We still have some time.”
Toby frowned. “Okay. So you found this on a dead body, and you came to me.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a sacrifice, obviously. The symbol is the key. The incantations ask for guidance in opening the door. The blood defines the outlines of the door. The rest—the mutilations, I mean—are how the cult members know the door is open.”
“Okay . . . you’ll have to walk me through this. First, what are they opening this door for?”
“You’d have to ask someone higher up in the Hand than me. It’s not my place to say.”
“You mentioned the snow before. Why?”
Toby smiled.
“What does the snow have to do with the cult?”
He suddenly leaned toward her over the table. Her whole body tensed.
“You can’t begin to imagine, little sister.”
“So enlighten me.”
Toby shook his head, that small smile still hanging on his lips, and looked away.
Kathy persisted. “Is there some significance to the cult that it’s snowing this late in the season? Are they planning something because of the snow? What is it?”
Toby stifled a chuckle. “You have it all wrong. It’s not that they’re planning something because of the snow. What they planned was the snow. It’s just the beginning. Another sign the door has swung open.”
Kathy frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about power. It’s all the Hand understands, or cares about.”
“And you?” she asked before she could stop herself. “What do you care about, Toby?”
He studied her a moment, seeming to calculate the urgency of her need for information with . . . well, whatever Toby balanced human decency in his head with. He glanced around before settling his gaze on her again. “Write this down.”
She pulled her cell phone from her purse and opened the notepad app. “Shoot.”
Toby gave her a name and address.
Kathy looked up from the phone. “Who’s this?”
“An insider with information. An insider, a former Hand low priestess, as a matter of fact, who . . . likes me. Heh. She should be able to tell you what you need safely, I imagine, if you tell her you’re mine. My sister, I mean.” He grinned in an odd way. It would have been a boyish, charming gesture to anyone who didn’t know him. “Like I said, you’d have to go higher up on the Hand food chain than me. My hands are tied, so to speak. She can give you truths. Some truths.” He offered her a wink that made her skin crawl. “You can tell her I sent you. But don’t tell her you’re a cop . . . or whatever you do now. Although it’s probably a moot point. If they got as far as calling forth the snow, then it’s already too late to stop it.” He stood up and signaled to the guard.
Before being led out, he looked at her with uncharacteristic softness. “You know, Kat . . . you were the only one who mattered. So much as anyone matters. And so I’ll tell you this. Forget about investigating any of this. Just leave. Leave town now before you can’t. Before the snow and its masters won’t let you. Do that for me. Or if not for me . . . then for you. Colby is fucked, and you can’t stop that.” When she didn’t respond, his mouth twisted into that hateful little sneer, and the softness in his eyes went dark again. Kathy fought the urge to gag as the guard led him away.
With him gone, her hand shook as she slipped the phone back into her purse. Kathy let go of a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and stood up to go.
Kathy made it all the way back to her car before the tears blurring her vision finally spilled down her cheeks. The wind had picked up some, and as it blew across her face, the tears that had slid into the slender track of her scar grew cold to the point of biting. She wiped them away with a gloved hand and unlocked the car door. She grabbed her snow brush off the passenger seat, then methodically began working to clear off her car. She wanted to focus only on the mindless task, the simple necessity of it, but she found herself stabbing into the ice beneath the snow with ferocity that made the tears well up again.
Her eyes had dried by the time she had finally cleared the car and got it moving. She had work to do, and distance between her and Toby would bring clarity and focus. Besides, she had to see one Charlene Ledders, former HSB low priestess and another current resident of a psychiatric wing, this time of Colby’s local hospital on the town outskirts, before the snow made travel impossible.