Two bright pink-and-yellow containers were familiar: the Burke Bailey’s ice cream that Robertson had purchased the previous afternoon. Maple walnut and mandarin-orange chocolate.
In addition, the compartment held about ten opaque Rubbermaid containers with red lids, the shape and the size in which to store leftover deep-dish lasagna. I would not have opened these if the topmost containers hadn’t featured freezer-proof hand-printed labels: HEATHER JOHNSON, JAMES DEERFIELD.
After all, I was looking specifically for names.
When I lifted aside the top containers, I saw more names on the lids under them: LISA BELMONT, ALYSSA RODRIQUEZ, BENJAMIN NADER….
I started with Heather Johnson. When I pried off the red lid, I found a woman’s breasts.
FORTY-NINE
SOUVENIRS. TROPHIES. OBJECTS TO SPUR THE imagination and thrill the heart on lonely nights.
As though it had burned my hands, I dropped the container back in the freezer. I shot to my feet and kicked the drawer shut.
I must have turned away from the refrigerator, must have crossed the kitchen, but I was not aware of going to the sink until I found myself there. Leaning against the counter, bent forward, I struggled to repress the urge to surrender Mrs. Sanchez’s cookies.
Throughout my life, I have seen terrible things. Some have been worse than the contents of the Rubbermaid container. Experience has not immunized me to horror, however, and human cruelty still has the power to devastate me, to loosen the locking pins in my knees.
Although I wanted to wash my hands and then splash cold water in my face, I preferred not to touch Robertson’s faucets. I shrank from the thought of using his soap.
Nine more containers waited in the freezer. Someone else would have to open them. I had no curiosity about the rest of the grotesque collection.
In the file folder that bore his name, Robertson had included nothing but the calendar page for August 15, suggesting that his own career as a murderer would begin on this date. Yet evidence in the freezer suggested that his file should already be thick.
Sweat sheathed me, hot on my face, cold along my spine. I might as well not have showered at the hospital.
I consulted my wristwatch—10:02.
The bowling alley didn’t open for business until one o’clock. The first showing of the hot-ticket dog movie was also scheduled for one o’clock.
If my prophetic dream was about to be fulfilled, evidence suggested that I might have no more than three hours to find Robertson’s collaborator and stop him.
I unclipped the cell phone from my belt. Flipped it open. Pulled out the antenna. Pressed the power button. Watched the maker’s logo appear and listened to the electronic signature music.
Chief Porter might not yet have regained consciousness. Even if he surfaced, his thoughts would be muddled by the lingering effects of anesthetic, by morphine or its equivalent, and by pain. He would have neither the strength nor presence of mind to give instructions to his subordinates.
To one extent or another, I knew all the officers on the PMPD. None had been made aware of my paranormal gift, however, and none had ever been as good a friend to me as was Chief Porter.
If I brought the police to this house, revealed to them the contents of the freezer, and urged them to apply all their resources to learning the name of Robertson’s kill buddy, they would need hours to wrap their minds around the situation. Because they did not share my sixth sense and would not easily be persuaded that it was real, they wouldn’t share my urgency.
They would detain me here while they investigated the situation. In their eyes, I would be as suspect as Robertson, for I had entered his house illegally. Who was to say that I hadn’t harvested these body parts myself and hadn’t planted the ten Rubbermaid containers in his freezer to incriminate him?
If ever they found Bob Robertson’s body, and if the chief—God forbid—succumbed to postoperative complications, I would surely be arrested and charged with murder.
I switched off the phone.
Without a name to focus my psychic magnetism, without anyone to turn to for assistance, I had hit a wall, and the impact rattled my teeth.
Something crashed to the floor in another room: not just the thump of a closing door this time, not merely a soft rapping, but a hard thud and the sound of breakage.
Driven by frustration so intense that it allowed no caution, I headed for the swinging door, trying to clip the phone to my belt. I dropped it, left it for later, and shoved through the swinging door, into the living room.
A lamp had been knocked to the floor. The ceramic base had shattered.
When I tore open the front door and saw no one on the stoop or on the lawn, I slammed it shut. Hard. The boom shook the house, and making noise greatly pleased me after so much pussyfooting. My anger felt good.
I rushed through the archway, into the narrow hall, seeking the perpetrator. Bedroom, closet, study, closet, bathroom. No one.
Crows on the roof hadn’t knocked over the lamp. Nor a draft. Nor an earthquake.
When I returned to the kitchen to pick up my phone and get out of the house, Robertson was waiting there for me.
FIFTY
FOR A DEAD MAN WHO NO LONGER HAD A STAKE in the schemes and games of this world, Robertson lingered with singular ferocity, as infuriated as he had been when I had watched him from the bell tower at St. Bart’s. His mushroom-colony body now seemed powerful, even in its lumpiness. His soft face and blurry features hardened and sharpened with rage.
No bullet hole, scorch mark, or stain marred his shirt. Unlike Tom Jedd, who carried his severed arm and pretended to use it as a back scratcher out there at Tire World, Robertson was in denial of his death, and he chose not to sport his mortal wound, just as Penny Kallisto had initially manifested without evidence of strangulation, acquiring the ligature marks only in the company of Harlo Landerson, her killer.
In high agitation, Robertson circled the kitchen. He glared at me, his eyes wilder and more fevered than those of the coyotes at the Church of the Whispering Comet.
When I had begun to out him, I had unintentionally made him a liability to his collaborator, setting him up for murder, but I had not pulled the trigger. Evidently, his hatred for me nonetheless exceeded what he harbored for the man who had killed him; otherwise, he would have done his haunting elsewhere.
Ovens to refrigerator, to sink, to ovens, he circled while I stooped and picked up the cell phone that I’d dropped earlier. Dead, he didn’t worry me a fraction as much as he had when I had thought he’d been alive in the churchyard.
As I clipped the phone to my belt, Robertson came to me. Loomed before me. His eyes were the gray of dirty ice, yet they conveyed the heat of his fury.
I met his stare and didn’t retreat from him. I’ve learned that it’s not wise to show fear in these cases.
His heavy face indeed had the quality of a fungus, but a meaty variety. Very portobello. His bloodless lips drew back from teeth that had seen too little of a brush.
He reached past my face and cupped his right hand against the back of my neck.
Penny Kallisto’s hand had been dry and warm. Robertson’s fe
lt damp, cold. This was not his real hand, of course, only part of an apparition, a spirit image, that only I could have felt; but the nature of such a touch reveals the character of the soul.
Although I refused to shy from this unearthly contact, I cringed inwardly at the thought of the creep playing with the ten souvenirs in his freezer. The visual stimulation of those frozen trophies might not always satisfy. Perhaps he thawed them now and then to increase his tactile pleasure and to conjure a more vivid memory of each kill—tweaking, pinching, petting, caressing, planting tender kisses upon those mementos.
No spirit, however evil, can harm a living person merely by touch. This is our world, not theirs. Their blows pass through us, and their bites draw no blood.
When he realized that he could not make me cower, Robertson lowered his hand from my neck. His fury doubled, trebled, wrenching his face into a gargoyle mask.
One way exists for certain spirits to harm the living. If their character is sufficiently pernicious, if they give their hearts to evil until malevolence ripens into incurable spiritual malignancy, they are able to summon the energy of their demonic rage and vent it upon the inanimate.
We call them poltergeists. I once lost a brand-new music system to such an entity, as well as the handsome award plaque for creative writing that I had won in that high-school competition judged by Little Ozzie.
As he had done in the sacristy at St. Bart’s, Robertson’s wrathful spirit stormed through the kitchen, and from his hands streamed pulses of energy that were visible to me. The air quivered with them, a sight similar to the concentric ripples that spread across water from the impact point of a stone.
Cabinet doors flew open, slammed shut, open, shut, banging even louder and with less meaning than the jaws of ranting politicians. Dishes erupted from shelves, each cutting through the air with the whoosh of a discus thrown by an Olympian.
I ducked a drinking glass, which exploded into an oven door, spraying sparkling shrapnel. Other glasses spun wide of me, shattered against walls, cabinets, countertops.
Poltergeists are all blind fury and thrashing torment, without aim or control. They can harm you only by indirection, a lucky blow. Even by indirection and chance, however, decapitation can ruin your day.