Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (8 page)

“I inherited it from my parents. They died in a plane crash.”

“I know.”

Of course you do
, she thought. Something about him seemed to change as she looked at him. It was as if he flickered in and out of focus, but at the same time was entirely present. He seemed kind and patient.

“You remind me of someone,” she said.

“Who?”

“My father. A little.”

He set the empty glass on the counter. “I have a message for you,” he said.

“What?”

“Someone is going to betray you. Someone you trust.”

“Someone I trust . . .” She hesitated, unsure how to respond.

“How you handle it,” he said, “will make all the difference.”

She wanted to say, “All the difference in what?” but before she could get the words out, he was gone.

She went to the counter and picked up the empty glass. She held it up to the light, wondering if angels had fingerprints.

Both the cardio and weight rooms at the All-Fit Sports, Health, and Fitness Center of Northern Westchester were filled to capacity with men and women working out. Tommy welcomed the newcomers and greeted the regulars, including a man the staff had dubbed The Poser because he was always pacing intensely and shaking his limbs and stretching as if he’d just finished a set of repetitions or was just about to begin one, but no one had ever seen him actually lifting weights. Tommy, who’d built the center after retiring from professional football, had gone to the gym to plow through some paperwork he’d been putting off, and because he needed to work out. He did his best thinking when he wasn’t trying to think. If he exercised, answers came to him, sometimes to questions he hadn’t even asked. He’d read enough scientific papers to know that when you are in the middle of a workout, the brain sometimes transitions into a wakeful, dream-like state, generating theta waves, akin to what happens during REM sleep. For him it was the right blend of conscious and unconscious thinking, a way to keep his body occupied while his mind was free to wander.

Dani had sent him a text that afternoon:
ABBIE’S DEATH SUSPECTED HOMICIDE. BODY FOUND IN LOCKED ROOM
. As he pushed through his reps, he tried to think of why anybody would bother to kill a 102-year-old woman. The first thing that occurred to him was that her property was one of the most coveted pieces of real estate on the East Coast. It was possible somebody wanted her out of the way in order to acquire the farm—it sounded far-fetched, but he’d heard scarier stories concerning choice bits
of land in Westchester County. The second thing that occurred to him: was it possible Abbie knew something about Julie Leonard’s murder? Maybe someone still wanted to stop her from talking.

He quickly showered and hurried to his car, eager to take a second look at the video he’d shot of his interview with Abbie in the nursing home. The roads were slick with wet leaves and strewn rotting shells of smashed Halloween pumpkins.

Ten minutes later he was home. He paused outside his gates to retrieve a package from his mailbox, an item he’d ordered online after the Leonard case was closed.

He set the package on the food island in his kitchen, grabbed a carving knife, and sliced open the box. He knew Dani would make fun of him for buying yet another gadget, but he really needed this one. Unlike, for example, the Locator, a device that used microchips to help you find your keys or your sunglasses—which would probably have worked fine, if he could remember where he had put the Locator.

He inserted batteries in the handheld infrared thermal imager, flipped open the video screen, turned the device on, and pointed it at his refrigerator. His $10,000 Sub-Zero was supposed to have a perfect seal around its door gaskets, but the image on the screen showed a blue spot at the top of the freezer where the seal leaked, as well as heat from the condenser coils venting out the toe-plate and around the sides. Things that were hot registered from yellow to orange to red, and things that were cold went in the opposite direction, registering from green to purple to blue. When he swung the imager around to scan his kitchen, he saw cold air coming in from a window he’d left open a crack, and orange heat radiating from the lights above the sink.

When he pointed the imager toward the back door to see if any cold air was leaking in, he saw the outline of a man radiating a shimmering white aura.

He looked up to see Charlie, who had changed out of his tuxedo from
the night before and was now wearing his customary black boots, jeans, and leather jacket.

“What’s that?” the angel asked.

“An infrared imager,” Tommy said.

“What’s it for?”

“Well . . . ,” Tommy said. He again felt a deep sense of awe and wonder, but at the same time the angel seemed approachable. “It measures heat. People use it to check their homes, to find places where they can be more energy efficient. For a better planet.”

Charlie seemed to be waiting for further explanation, so Tommy handed him the device and helped him point it toward the refrigerator.

“Cool,” the angel said, handing it back.

“I know,” Tommy said. “It’s a RAZ-IR PRO. It even has an optical lens so that—”

“I meant the air leaking from your freezer is cool,” Charlie said.

“Oh. Yeah,” Tommy said. “I should fix that.”

“Do you like root beer floats?” Charlie said.

“I do, though I eat sugar-free ice cream, which doesn’t work as well. But I like root beer floats.”

“Particularly on summer nights when you’re sitting on the porch,” the angel said.

“Exactly,” Tommy said, puzzled.

“Why are you trying to be energy efficient?”

“We all should be,” Tommy said, “but that’s not why I bought it. I’ll show you.”

He turned on the computer in his kitchen, logged in to his security system, then switched views from video feeds to infrared. Charlie watched over his shoulder.

“The guy I bought the house from installed this system,” Tommy said. “I recorded this one night about a month ago. I couldn’t even see it until I slowed the video down thirty times. Anything generating heat shows up as
yellow, orange, or red. Things that are cold show up as green, blue, or deep blue-violet.”

He clicked on a file that showed something, an entity of some sort, registering deep blue, moving from the woods to the edge of Tommy’s house. Then it passed through the wall, exiting a moment later.

“Not sure what it was doing here. Maybe just trying to scare us.”

“What did you think it was?”

“Dani and I think it was a demon,” Tommy said, looking to the angel for confirmation. “The handheld infrared seemed like a good way to detect the presence of a demon.”

“Sounds about right,” the angel said. “But doesn’t your heart tell you when evil is present?”

“Yeah, but it’s hard to be certain sometimes,” Tommy said. “There’s so much of it around.”

“Tell me about it,” Charlie said.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” the angel said, glancing briefly at the sports page lying on Tommy’s food island. Tommy had grabbed the newspaper from the picnic pavilion where he’d spoken with Carl, intending to read it later.

“I used to play with him,” Tommy said, realizing Charlie was looking at the photograph of Tommy’s former teammate. “You follow football?”

“A little,” Charlie said.

Tommy usually knew when somebody wanted to talk football. This didn’t feel like one of those times.

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to help you.”

“Help me how? I mean
us
. Help
us
how?”

“It depends on the situation,” Charlie said.

“So you can’t say? Or you don’t know?”

The angel nodded enigmatically. “This is my first time.”

“Your first time what?”

“Here,” Charlie said. “On Earth. I came here tonight to tell you something. Someone you trust will betray you.”

“Who?”

“That’s all that I know. But how you handle it will be critical.”

“Okay, but—”

“And tell your friend he should try to sign with the Patriots,” Charlie said.

“Do you know who’s going to win the Super Bowl?”

The angel shook his head. “No. We just like Bill Belichick.”

“Huh,” Tommy said. “That explains a lot.”

He glanced down at the sports page. When he looked up, Charlie was gone.

Tommy picked up his RAZ-IR PRO infrared thermal camera, went out to the back porch, and scanned the forest behind his house. The woods were cool, greens and blues, save the yellow outline of a small raccoon lurking in the underbrush, waiting for his chance to raid Tommy’s garbage cans. He scanned the ground, hoping to find a set of warm footprints leading away from his house. Nothing. When he pointed the sensor toward the heavens, he saw an array of stars, orange points of light against a blue background, which was odd because the sensor wasn’t able to read the heat from stars in space. It could have been something other than angels he’d detected in the sky above him, but he doubted it.

The phone rang and Dani answered.

“What’s up?” she heard Tommy say.

“Nothing much. I ate at my sister’s. She wants me to bring you over some night for dinner.”

“I’d like that.”

She wasn’t sure why, but she decided not to tell him what the angel had said to her, not until she’d had time to give it more thought.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Tommy asked.

“I want to have a look at the brain tissue analysis on Amos Kasden. The ME ordered a full workup.”

“Okay.”

“I also need to tell you what I learned today when we viewed Abbie Gardener’s body.”

“And I want to have another look at the interview we did with her,” Tommy said. “Oh, and I told Carl everything. He’s in.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Call you tomorrow?”

Tommy agreed and hung up. He’d called to tell her about the warning Charlie had given him and to set up a time to show her what he’d recorded on his new thermal imager, but something odd—a hesitation in her voice, as if there were something she wasn’t telling him—had stopped him.

He shrugged it off and decided he’d tell her tomorrow.

7.

Banerjee told Dani he had an early appointment in Chappaqua and suggested that she meet him afterward at the district attorney’s Mt. Kisco office, where they could use the flat screen in the conference room to go over the postmortem lab report on Amos Kasden. The day was overcast and blustery. Dani wore her black North Face down parka and was glad that the BMW she’d inherited from her father had heated seats.

The leaves had fallen and the branches were bare, which meant that as she drove the winding road to Mt. Kisco she could see the grand houses and estates that the foliage hid from view during the summer. East Salem, New York, in northern Westchester County, was where the Department of Public Works had dammed up streams and rivers in the early 1800s to create reservoirs to supply the great metropolis of New York City with drinking water. The hills remained forested, by zoning code, to protect the reservoirs from soil erosion, creating a pristine wilderness just an hour north of Manhattan, overrun by deer and the predators that fed on them, coyotes and bobcats and even a mountain lion, according to reports. Northern Westchester was where celebrities and CEOs and mutual-fund managers built their mansions and their horse farms, but it was also home to automobile mechanics, single moms, nurses, and landscaping crews.