She took a deep breath, let it out. "At three in the morning on Sunday, Dave came back to our apartment covered in someone else's blood."
It was out there now. The words had left her mouth and entered the atmosphere. They formed a wall in front of her and Jimmy and then that wall sprouted a ceiling and another wall behind them and they were suddenly cloistered within a tiny cell created by a single sentence. The noises along the avenue died and the breeze vanished, and all Celeste could smell was Jimmy's cologne and the bright May sun baked into the steps at their feet.
When he spoke, Jimmy sounded like someone's hand clenched his throat. "What did he say happened?"
She told him. She told him everything, up to and including last night's vampire madness. She told him, and she saw that every word out of her mouth became just one more word he wanted to hide from. They burned him. They entered his skin like darts. His mouth and eyes curled back from them, and the skin tightened on his face until she could see the skeleton underneath, and her body temperature dropped at an image of him lying in a coffin with long, pointed fingernails and a crumbling jaw, flowing moss for hair.
And when the tears began to fall silently down his cheeks, she resisted the urge to press his face to her neck, to feel those tears leak into her blouse and down her back.
She kept talking because she knew if she stopped, she'd stop for good, and she couldn't stop because she had to tell someone why she'd left, why she'd run from a man she'd sworn to stand by in good times and bad, a man who'd fathered her child, and told her jokes, and caressed her hand, and provided his chest for her to fall asleep on. A man who'd never complained and who'd never hit her, and who'd been a wonderful father and a good husband. She needed to tell someone how confused she was when that man seemed to vanish as if the mask that had been his face fell to the floor and a leering monstrosity peeked back at her.
She finished up by saying. "I still don't know what he did, Jimmy. I still don't know whose blood that was. I don't. Not conclusively. I just don't. But I'm so, so scared."
Jimmy turned on the step so that his upper half was propped against the wrought-iron banister. The tears had dried into his skin, and his mouth formed a small oval of shock. He stared back at Celeste with a gaze that seemed to go through her and down the avenue and fixate on something blocks away that no one else could see.
Celeste said, "Jimmy," but he waved her away and closed his eyes tight. He lowered his head and sucked oxygen into his mouth.
The cell around them evaporated, and Celeste nodded at Joan Hamilton as she walked by and gave them both a sympathetic and yet vaguely suspicious glance before clicking her shoes up the sidewalk. The sounds of the avenue returned with its beeps and door creakings, its distant calling of names.
When Celeste looked back at Jimmy, she was fixed in his gaze. His eyes were clear, his mouth closed, and he'd pulled his knees up by his chest. He rested his arms on them and she could feel a fierce and belligerent intelligence coming from him, his mind beginning to work far faster and with more originality than most people would muster in a lifetime.
"The clothes he wore are gone," he said.
She nodded. "I checked. Yeah."
He placed his chin on his knees. "How scared are you? Honestly."
Celeste cleared her throat. "Last night, Jimmy, I thought he was going to bite me. And then just keep biting."
Jimmy tilted his face so that his left cheek rested on his knees now, and he closed his eyes. "Celeste," he whispered.
"Yes?"
"Do you think Dave killed Katie?"
Celeste felt the answer rumble up through her body like last night's vomit. She felt its hot feet pound across her heart.
"Yes," she said.
Jimmy's eyes snapped open.
Celeste said, "Jimmy? God help me."
* * *
SEAN LOOKED ACROSS his desk at Brendan Harris. The kid looked confused and tired and scared, just the way Sean wanted him. He'd sent two troopers over to pick him up at his house and bring him back down here, and then he'd let Brendan sit on the other side of his desk while he scrolled down his computer screen and studied all the data he'd amassed on the kid's father, taking his time about it, ignoring Brendan, letting him sit there and fidget.
He looked back at the screen now, tapped the scroll-down key with his pencil simply for effect, and said, "Tell me about your father, Brendan."
"What?"
"Your father. Raymond senior. You remember him?"
"Barely. I was, like, six when he bailed on us."
"So you don't remember the guy."
Brendan shrugged. "I remember little things. He used to come in the house singing when he was drunk. He took me to Canobie Lake Park once and bought me cotton candy and I ate half of it and puked all over the teacup ride. He wasn't around a lot, I remember that. Why?"
Sean's eyes were back on the screen. "What else you remember?"
"I dunno. He smelled like Schlitz and Dentyne. He?"
Sean could hear a smile in Brendan's voice and he looked up, caught it sliding softly across his face. "He what, Brendan?"
Brendan shifted in his chair, his gaze fixed on something that wasn't in the squad room, wasn't even in the current time zone. "He used to carry all this change, you know? It weighed down his pockets, and he made noise when he walked. When I was a kid, I'd sit in the living room at the front of the house. It was a different place than where we live now. It was nice. And I'd sit there around five o'clock and keep my eyes closed until I heard him and his coins coming up the street. Then I'd bolt out of the house to see him, and if I could guess how much he had in one pocket? if I was even close, you know?? he'd give it to me." Brendan's smile widened and he shook his head. "The man had a lot of change."
"What about a gun?" Sean said. "Your father have a gun?"
The smile froze and Brendan's eyes narrowed at Sean like he didn't understand the language. "What?"
"Did your father have a gun?"
"No."
Sean nodded and said. "You seem pretty sure for someone who was only six when he left."
Connolly entered the squad room carrying a cardboard box. He walked over to Sean and placed the box on Whitey's desk.
"What is it?" Sean said.
"A bunch of stuff," Connolly said, peering inside. "CSS reports, ballistics, fingerprint analysis, the 911 tape, a bunch of stuff."
"You already said that. What's up on the fingerprints?"
"No matches to anyone in the computer."