The Shadow Box (53 page)

With luck, however, they'll have the summer. Three
months, maybe four, of being with him and of feeling him
up against her. And inside her. She blushed and grinned
at the thought. She could scarcely believe how brazen she
had become.

The grin faded when a picture of Bronwyn flitted
through her mind. She didn't let it stay. She didn't want
to see them together or even think about her anymore
because one day she might blurt out to Michael what she
felt about her. That Bronwyn had never loved him. Mi
chael won't want to know that. He'll think that it's jeal
ousy talking. He might even be right.

She had also begun to worry about making love with
Michael. It was okay for now. Much more than okay. But
she couldn't be sure how she might react to it after the
weather turns warmer—in August, for example—and she
feels his skin getting sweaty.

What if it takes her back?

What if she starts thinking of those men who would
come into her room at night. And cover her mouth so she
couldn't scream. And hold her down. What if she suddenly panics and starts clawing at Michael? She knew that he
wouldn't start beating her. Not Michael. He's not like
them at all. But what if it just gets him more excited? She
would hate it if he liked it when she gets that way.

September, in any case, will be time to move on. She
thought she would sail down to the Yucatan, stay there for a year or two. The Oceanographic Institute will be
doing studies for at least that long of the area where the
big comet struck. The one that wiped out all the dinosaurs.
The ocean floor there is unlike any in the world. It should
be very interesting. It should help her forget.

Megan blinked her eyes. She brought her fingers to
her temples.

Right now, suddenly, she was seeing graves.

A lot of them.

She wondered why she was seeing graves.

Moon got back, he told Johnny G., almost four hours
later.

Rasmussen, he said, was near out of his mind because
every crawly thing in those woods must have stopped to
visit that hole and try to lap at the blood where Jake had
ripped his eyebrow open.

Moon had the money. He had one set of books from
the office and two more from Rasmussen’s house. He had
Rasmussen’s bankbooks, checkbooks, and passport. He
also had the personnel file of a man named Reinhardt
Brunner. He told Jake that he had set fire to the office
after searching it, then waited a few blocks away until he
could see flames coming through the roof.

Jake asked, “That took you four hours?”

“Had some other business. And I burned his house
down, too.”

Jake's eyes went wide. “Tom said he had a wife and kids.”

”I looked. No kid ever lived in that house. Only pic
tures of kids.”

It turned out later that he'd married some divorced
woman just so he could stay in the country. As far as anyone knew, he never saw her again once he got his
papers. And it turned out that Brunner had an SS tattoo
under his armpit. He'd tried to get it scraped off but they
could still make it out.

“What was that other business?” asked Johnny G.

”I left Brunner on Rasmussen's front lawn.”

“Oh.”

There wasn't much more to tell. After going through
the ledgers, the ones from his house in particular, Jake
told Rasmussen that if he wasn't out over the Atlantic by
ten the next morning, he wouldn't be leaving at all. Told
him Westchester Airport was a good place to start. He
could walk there in half an hour. Jake handed him his
passport. They left him in the woods.

Jake got home, waited until nine the next morning, and made a few phone calls. Before noon, the two warehouses
had been raided and everything in them seized. The print
shop was padlocked and Eagle's bank accounts were fro
zen. Jake told them it was Tom they had to thank for
shutting that whole operation down but, all the same, the
deal was he didn't want to see the name Fallon—not
any
Fallon—in any newspapers, court papers, or even on a thank-you note.

Jake had waited, as opposed to calling in the middle of
the night, because he wanted to give Rasmussen time to
get away. Jake didn't want a trial either.

Those ledgers, come to think on it, are probably still in
Jake's basement. He and Doyle spent a few days going
over them. He said one of these days he'd get around to
burning them. For now, however, he had a brother and a
nephew to take care of.

“Did Rasmussen leave the country?”

“Guess so.”

“He went back to Germany. Where you think he
worked his way into AdChem?”

Moon shrugged, then nodded.

“Does Michael know all this?”

“No.”

“And yet he ends up working for them.”

“John . . . we've been through this.” His tone carried
a warning.

Johnny G. raised both hands. “Look,” he said quietly.
“People do things and they don't know why they do
them.”

He got up from the bench, started pacing. In part to be
out of Moon's reach.

“There was this house I saw once,” said the younger
man. “Just a plain everyday house over in Bayside but I
couldn't get it out of my mind. This ever happen to you?
I kept driving past it. I didn't know why and I still don't.”

Moon saw where he was headed. Michael might not
have known—except for bits and pieces—but maybe he
felt.
Maybe AdChem pulled at Michael without him ever
realizing it. It was possible. But it also didn't matter.

“Moon . . . why don't you just tell him?”

Because there's more.

”I mean . . . Mike and I used to talk about this. He
knew back in high school that his father was no saint.”

”I know he did.”

“You're afraid he'll think less of you and Jake?”

Moon didn't answer.

“Or you're scared he'll go looking for Rasmussen.”

Moon shook his head.

“What, then?”

“Scared he'll find him before I do.”

A grave again. Just one.

Megan was showering and she saw it in her mind.

She dismissed it at first because she thought that she knew what it was. It had happened before. She'd had
flashbacks to that grave up in Braintree where that man
buried two of his victims. She had seen him dig it and
she had watched as he filled it. She saw him go back to
his car and sit, his shoulders hunched forward, for several minutes before he drove away. She knew that he was
masturbating. And there were birds. She kept hearing the
sounds of birds.

She
saw him again, or that part of her mind did, when
he reached the street where he lived and stopped in the
driveway of his house. A woman, a neighbor, had gone out to her mailbox. She greeted the man by name and
wished him a happy Thanksgiving. The woman called him
Andy. He preferred to be called Andrew. He smiled and
waved at the woman. But he called her a cunt in his mind.

His house was a saltbox, she thought, painted Wi
l
liamsburg blue with red or maroon shutters. She never
quite
saw the interior but she knew that he kept it very
neat. He lived alone. An older woman had lived there,
until not long ago, perhaps his mother. She was dead now,
thought Megan, but Megan had no particular sense that
this man had harmed her.

Megan did have one odd notion. She had a sense that
this man, this Andrew, became invisible once he stepped
through his door. The police asked her what that meant.
She had no idea.

But she saw a little bit more of the neighbor's house,
she told them. Perhaps that would help them find this man.
The neighbor's mailbox had lavender mums planted at its
base. On her door she'd hung a pretty arrangement of
autumn leaves and three ears of indian corn. Just inside,
on a little table, she kept a silver bowl that still had Hal
loween candies in it.

Within hours, the police arrested Andrew Birdsong.
They knew him and they didn't. They had questioned him
almost a year before this but only as a possible witness
to an earlier murder. They'd never had a reason to sus
pect him.

There was semen on the front seat of his car. By the
end of that day, he confessed to the murders of six women.
The murders began after his mother died. Or, as Andrew
had put it, after she was taken from him.

And he had no mirrors in that house. Not one, not even
on the bathroom cabinets. That, she supposed,
is why he
felt invisible.

The strange thing was that he needn't have confessed.
Her visions were useless as evidence. Nothing tied him to
the gravesite except a few fibers and the mud on his shoes.
He didn't bat an eye when the police said they had a
witness who had seen him digging that grave. He only
began to fidget when they said that the witness was a
woman. The woman, they lied, had been walking her dog
in those woods. She had seen everything he did that day. What made Andrew Birdsong fall apart, what humiliated
him, was learning that a woman, a hated woman, had
caught him jacking off.