37

A search of John Mulvaney’s property turned up a pair of leather gloves (wool-lined), a pair of coveralls, a denim jacket with a fleece lining, and a pair of Wolverines, size 10—all stained with Drew Sturdivant’s blood and hidden in a garbage bag in John’s garage. Traces of Drew’s blood were found on the gas and brake pedals of John’s Honda. (They always forget about the pedals, Jackson had said.) The carpet in his trunk smelled as though it had recently been cleaned. And the fingerprint, of course, turned out to be his.

I still didn’t understand why John had so deliberately drawn me into the carnage. Until McKnight sent a squad car for me late Sunday afternoon. “I think you should see this,” he said.

I walked into John Mulvaney’s living room and looked around. The floors and walls were bare, the furniture stiff and unwelcoming. There were no lamps, only an old overhead fixture, which had become a burial ground for moths and gnats. The only touch of personality came from several picture frames, arranged at angles around the room. I walked over to the mantle, picked one up, and gasped, then looked more closely at the rest. All the photos were of me.

As we walked through the house, the rooms became more bizarre and disordered. Books, newspapers, and magazines teetered in stacks. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. Dark lumps of clothing lay in heaps on the floor. A plant lay overturned and dying. And everywhere, there were photos of me. Snapshots were taped to the cabinets in his kitchen and poster-size shots were pinned to the walls of his bedroom. Framed photos punctuated the shelves of his study. All the photos had been taken without my knowledge, of course. At different times of day. In every possible state of dress. Some, it seemed, had been taken from quite a distance. In many of them, I recognized the rooms of my house in the background.

One photo taped to the wall in his study—a close-up of me smiling and talking to David at an outdoor cafe at night—was pocked with holes. He’d been using it as a dartboard.

His study housed a Macintosh computer stocked with photo-imaging software, along with what looked to be a very expensive color laser printer. His desk was littered with digital photography equipment. McKnight scrolled through the images in his cameras. More images of me.

“Stop,” I said finally. “I don’t want to see any more.”

McKnight put the camera down.

“I guess he had a thing for you,” Jackson said.

“How flattering,” I said.

“These pictures,” McKnight said, “they could be of anyone. You know that, don’t you? You’re just…the object of his obsession. Object being the key word here.”

“I know. It’s not about me. He doesn’t know me.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Jackson said. “He couldn’t possibly.”

I turned to McKnight. “Still believe in the Occam rule?”

“How does it go again?”

“In complex situations, barring the supernatural, the simplest solution is usually the right one.”

He shrugged. “Sure. But sometimes the simplest explanation isn’t the obvious one. I’ll give you that.”

I stepped past the dartboard and back into the living room, McKnight following along silently behind me. “You can’t bar the supernatural,” I said at last.

“Come again?”

“‘Barring the supernatural, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.’ That’s the rule. But you can’t bar the supernatural.”

“Take a look around, Dr. Foster. This ain’t the supernatural. This is just plain sick.”

“What do you make of the evil you saw in that interview room? You saw it, Detective. You felt it. It was as real as the two of us standing here now.”

He nodded. “Yep. I did.”

“There’s more to this than simple deviance and violence. We ran across…something dark, something very dark in that interview room.”

He nodded.

“That’s all I’m saying,” I said. “Sometimes there’s more to a situation than you can see with your eyes.”

I said my good-byes and walked out of John Mulvaney’s twisted little world and out into the crisp afternoon. The sun had begun its slide behind the leaves, pinking the sky and lighting the houses around me in a bright, golden wash of light. The bare branches of the trees seemed sharp, lined out against the wash of color in hard relief. The scene was so artful, so vivid, it seemed almost ordained, like a photograph.

But I’d had enough of photographs for one day. I got in my truck and drove to my house, my back to the sunset, switching my headlights on in the dimming winter light, my eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.

I never got the chance to ask Gordon Pryne why he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. Martinez saw him a couple of times before they shipped him back to Huntsville. Jackson and McKnight blamed it on the meth. And barring the supernatural, I suppose that made sense. But from what I knew about Peter Terry, and about the battle Gordon Pryne was clearly losing for his mind and for his soul, I suspected he’d been put up to it.

Peter Terry is a liar, a cheat, and a thief. He’d steal what was left of Gordon Pryne just for the sheer entertainment of it. He enjoys waste, I believe. He preys on the lost and broken while they’re standing at the brink, and then lures them over the edge to an ugly demise. To waste a soul, to trick a human being—the invaluable bearer of divine image—into despair and self-abnegation, this, for him, would be the consummate victory in his strange, twisted game. A losing game for his side, ultimately. I was certain he knew that. But clearly he intended to rack up as many points as possible before the buzzer.

I hoped that sometime, during her years at the Jesus commune, Drew Sturdivant had heard about love instead of judgment. I wanted to believe that someone had mentioned to her, even once, that God, unlike any other father she’d known in her short, impoverished life, is magnanimous with His love. That He dips from a bottomless well of regard and would fill even her dirty, chipped cup generously and without blame.

I hoped she’d heard somewhere along the way that love is not something that must be earned. That grace is not a merit-based system. And that there are no grades to be won or lost.

I doubted she had. Her report cards were proof enough of that. The paucity of this truth in Drew’s life was, to me, the final tragedy of her brief time on this hard, surly earth.

I met Maria Chavez that night for supper, and invited Detective Martinez along at the last minute. The three of us went to a little Italian place with outside heaters and a roaring brick pizza oven and sat outside, tossing our winter coats aside in the warmth of the enclosed patio.

I sat across the table, my injuries throbbing, but feeling safe for the first time in weeks. I watched the two of them laugh and talk in Spanish about their Yayas and wondered to myself what sort of help Maria Chavez really needed. What had that dying homeless woman meant that night in the E.R.? Maria was a survivor. Anyone could see that. And she was, clearly, the perfect mother for her son, chosen, it seemed, for that purpose.

But her son, born of violence into serenity and love—what of him? Was Nicholas, sweet, wild-haired Nicholas, really as fatherless as he seemed? Had Peter Terry been there that day too? With Gordon Pryne? In Gordon Pryne?

I studied Martinez, so strong and quiet and wise, and wondered what a father—a spiritual man, a man of God, a man of strength and integrity—what could a man like that add to Nicholas’s life?

“Dylan,” someone said.

I came back to the table. “Hm?”

“We’re being so rude! We’re leaving you out of the conversation entirely,” Maria said. She turned to Martinez. “No more Spanish tonight.”

Martinez nodded. “Si, no mas Español.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “You guys are hysterical. I don’t feel left out. I just wish I had a Yaya, that’s all. Anyone know where I can get one?”

We sat laughing and talking and eating pizza and drinking wine late into the night, the company warming me as much as the fire did. It was the first time in a while that I could remember smiling. The first time I could remember feeling anything other than afraid. Or alone.

I missed David, of course. He still hadn’t called. Eventually, I knew he’d come around, at least to end it politely. It wasn’t in his nature to leave things unresolved.

I hoped, though, that sometime soon I’d get the chance to talk to him. And to give him a kiss. And to say, quite sincerely, that I was sorry.

That, after all, is what is required in matters such as this. A little angel had told me so.