I punched Sikes hard on the side of the head. His head snapped back so hard against the house’s aluminum siding that he left a dent in it. He was weaving now, his breath coming in gasps. Suddenly, there were wails of sirens in the distance. The woman inside must have called the police. I was the police, wasn’t I?
Somebody hit me from behind, hit me real hard. “Oh, Jesus, no,” I moaned and tried to shake off the hurt.
This wasn’t possible! This couldn’t be happening!
Who had hit me? Why? I didn’t get it, couldn’t understand, couldn’t clear my head fast enough.
I was dizzy and hurt but I turned, anyway.
I saw a frizzy-haired blond woman wearing an oversized Farm Aid T-shirt. She was still holding the work shovel she’d just clobbered me with.
“Get off my boyfriend!” she screamed at me. Her face and neck were beet red. “Get away from him or I’ll hit you again. You get away from my Davey.”
My Davey?… Jesus! My head was spinning, but I got the message. I thought I did, anyway. Davey Sikes had come out here to see his girlfriend. He wasn’t hunting anyone. He wasn’t here to murder anyone. He was Farm Aid’s boyfriend.
Maybe I’d lost it, I thought as I backed away from Sikes. Maybe I was finally burned beyond a crisp, beyond recognition or redemption. Or maybe I was like almost every other homicide detective I knew—overworked and fallible as hell. I’d made a mistake. I’d been wrong about Davey Sikes—I just didn’t understand how it had happened.
Kyle Craig arrived at the house in McCullers within the hour. He was as calm as ever, completely unruffled. He spoke quietly to me. “Detective Sikes has been having an affair with the woman in the house for over a year. We knew about it. Detective Sikes isn’t a suspect. He isn’t Casanova. Go home, Alex. Just go home now. You’re through here.”
CHAPTER 119
I DIDN’T go home. I went to visit Kate at Duke University Medical Center. She didn’t look good; she was pale and haggard; she was rail-thin. She didn’t sound good, either. But Kate was much, much improved. She was out of the coma.
“Look who’s finally awake,” I said from the doorway into her room.
“You got one of the bad guys, Alex,” Kate whispered as she saw me. She smiled faintly, and she spoke in a slow, uncertain way. It was Kate, but not quite Kate.
“Did you see that in your dreams?” I asked her.
“Yep.” She smiled again, that sweet smile of hers. She was talking so very slowly. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
“I brought you a little present,” I told her. I held up a teddy bear dressed to look like a doctor. Kate took the bear and she continued to grin. The magical smile almost made her look like her old self.
I put my head down close to Kate’s. I kissed her swollen head
as if it were the most delicate flower ever put on the earth. Sparks flew, strange ones, but maybe the strongest ones yet.
“I missed you more than I can say,” I whispered against her hair.
“Say it,” she whispered back. Then she smiled again. We both did. Her speech was a little slow maybe, but not her mind.
Ten days later, Kate was up on a clumsy, four-legged metal walker. She was complaining that she hated the “mechanical contraption” and would be off it within a week. Actually, it took her almost four weeks, but even that was considered miraculous.
She had a half-moon indentation on the left side of her forehead from the terrible beating. So far, she had refused plastic surgery to repair it. She thought her dent added character.
In a way it did. It was pure, unadulterated Kate McTiernan. “It’s also part of my life story, so it stays,” she said. Her speech was closer to normal, getting a little clearer every week.
Whenever I saw Kate’s half-moon dent, I was reminded of Reginald Denny, the truck driver who was so savagely beaten during the Los Angeles riots. I remembered how he looked after the Rodney King verdict. Denny’s head was severely dented, actually staved in, on one side. It still looked that way when I saw him on TV a year after the incident. I also thought of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story called “The Birthmark.” The dent was Kate’s one imperfection. With it, in my eyes, anyway, she was even more beautiful and special than she’d been before.
I spent most of July at home with my family in Washington. I took two short trips back to see Kate in Durham, but that was all. How many fathers get to spend a month with their kids, catching up with their wild-and-wooly run through childhood? Damon and Jannie were both playing organized baseball that summer. They were still music, movie, general noise, and hot chocolate-chip-cookie addicts. They both slept on the quilt with me for the first week or so—while I was recuperating, while I was trying to forget my recent time spent in hell.
I worried that Casanova would come after me for killing his best friend, but so far there was no sign of him. No more beautiful women had been abducted in North Carolina. It was absolutely certain now that he wasn’t Davey Sikes. Several area policemen had been investigated; including his partner Nick Ruskin, and even Chief Hatfield. Every cop had alibis, and they all checked out. Who the hell was Casanova then? Was he going to just disappear, like his underground house? Had he gotten away with all those horrifying murders? Could he just stop killing now?
My grandmother still had volumes of psychological and other kinds of useful advice for me to follow. Much of it was directed at the subject of my love life, and my leading a normal life for a change. She wanted me to go into private practice, anything but police work.
“The children need a grandmother, and a mother,” Nana Mama told me from the pulpit of her stove where she was fixing her breakfast one morning.
“So I should go out and look for a mother for Damon and Jannie? That what you’re telling me?”