Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(69)

Forty-Seven


The haze around the moon seemed to suggest a softening at day’s end, but DeMarco felt only the approaching chill of night. The time was not yet six p.m., but the sun was low and weak on the western horizon, the gibbous moon rising pale and clouded on the other side of the sky.

DeMarco sat on the top of three steps off his back porch, feet on the pad of interconnecting bricks he had started to lay nearly a decade earlier. He had removed the sod, excavated, and leveled the path from his porch to the side door of the garage some sixty feet away, but had laid only the first three sections of the pathway before everything was interrupted. The bricks were arranged in a herringbone pattern and ended nine feet from the porch step. He had started the pathway so Laraine would be able to walk from the garage to the house without having to step through the puddles that accumulated in the backyard after heavy rains. Now when it rained, the last fifty feet of the trench filled with muddy water, temporarily submerging the weeds that sprouted from the packed earth. Now he parked on the street and only occasionally unlocked the garage to drag out the mower. Old, split bags of grass seed and mulch and potting soil still sat in the dark corners, the clay pots Laraine had used to start her herb garden every spring, filmy plastic bags filled with dried-up gladiola and tulip bulbs.

DeMarco was weary of the unfinished path and overgrown yard, of the nubilous moon and the lowering sun. He tried to remember the energy and exuberance for life he had felt during those long ago days when he had started the brick path and the room above the garage. But it was like trying to remember a decade-old dream. The nostalgia was there, the sense of loss, but little else remained.

He dipped the edge of a whole-wheat bolillo roll into a plastic pint container filled with kalamata and other olives, sun-dried tomatoes and roasted garlic gloves, but the pleasant slipperiness of the garlicky oil registered on his tongue only distantly, it too like little more than a memory of something once savored. The cold beer in its brown, beaded bottle satisfied only in the slight burn as it went down his throat.

He had been waiting all day for the results from the search of Bonnie’s house. He knew that pubic hair from two individuals had been recovered from the bedsheet, and that a few tiny splatters of somebody’s blood had been recovered from the lavatory faucet. But it would be several days before the DNA tests were finished. Even then, they would tell him nothing until he had other DNA samples for comparison. In particular, he wanted to know whose fingerprints were on the second beer bottle on Bonnie’s coffee table. They would belong, he knew, to whatever man was with Bonnie now. He did not want to believe that Huston was that man, could not conceive of a single valid reason why Huston would make such a choice, but he also knew enough of human behavior to know that logic seldom applied when an ample supply of testosterone was stirred into the mix.

Unfortunately, Trooper Carmichael had not yet been able to run the prints through the national fingerprinting database. Computers were down somewhere. Meanwhile, another forensics team was searching Whispers. DeMarco had nothing to do but sit and wait. Bowen had ordered him to go home and get some rest—“And get something to eat, for Chrissakes”—a couple hours of enforced downtime.

DeMarco sucked on a kalamata olive, then spit the pit into the grass. Maybe an olive tree will grow, he thought. The tree of life. Maybe he would plant an apple tree beside it. The tree of knowledge. “My own fucking Garden of Eden,” he said.

The muted jangle of his cell phone startled him. He yanked the phone from his hip pocket and put it to his ear without looking at the caller ID. “It’s about fucking time,” he said.

“Excuse me?” the male voice said. “Is this Sergeant DeMarco?”

“I’m sorry. I was expecting another call. Is this Nathan?”

“Yes, sir, it is. I, uh…I just got home a couple of minutes ago and I found this disturbing message on my answering machine. I thought you should know about it.”

“Disturbing how?”

“It’s from Thomas.”

DeMarco sat up very straight. “And?”

“It came in at 4:19 p.m. I’ve been away from my apartment all day and—”

“What did he say, Nathan?”

“Hold on a minute. I’ll play it for you.”

A button clicked. Nathan’s recorded greeting. A beep. Then the voice of Thomas Huston, hoarse and slow, chilling in the flatness of its delivery: “It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

“I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea:

But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

“And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.

“The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea)