Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

We both turned our heads, looked at him.

“Are you?” Dolquist said.

Alec Hardiman’s head turned back slowly to face me, and his glasses slipped halfway down his nose. The eyes behind the lenses were the milky green of Caribbean shallows. “Forgive Doctor Dolquist’s interruption, Patrick. He’s a little on edge lately about his wife.”

“My wife,” Dolquist said.

“Doctor Dolquist’s wife, Judith,” Hardiman said, “left him once for another man. Did you know that, Patrick?”

Dolquist picked at some lint on his knee, concentrated on his shoes.

“And then she came back, and he took her back. I’m sure there were tears, pleas for forgiveness, some minor snide remarks on the doctor’s part. One can only assume. But that was three years ago, wasn’t it, Doctor?”

Dolquist looked at Hardiman and his eyes were clear but his breathing was slightly shallow and his right hand still picked absently at his pant leg.

“I have it on good authority,” Hardiman said, “that on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month, Doctor Dolquist’s Queen Judith allows penetration of her every orifice by two former inmates of this institution at the Red Roof Inn on Route One in Saugus. I wonder how Doctor Dolquist feels about that.”

“Enough, Inmate,” Lief said.

Dolquist looked at a point somewhere over Hardiman’s head and his voice was smooth, but the back of his neck bore a swath of hard bright red. “Alec, your delusions are for another time. Today—”

“They’re not delusions.”

“—Mr. Kenzie is here at your behest and—”

“Second and fourth Wednesdays,” Hardiman said, “between two and four at the Red Roof Inn. Room two seventeen.”

Dolquist’s voice faltered for just a moment, a pause or an intake of breath which wasn’t quite natural and I heard it and so did Hardiman, and Hardiman smiled slightly at me.

Dolquist said, “The point of this meeting—”

Hardiman waved his thin fingers dismissively and turned his full attention to me. I could see myself mirrored in the icy fluorescent light that ran along the upper half of both lenses, his green pupils floating just below my melting features. He leaned forward again and I resisted the urge to lean back because I could suddenly feel the heat of him, smell the torpid, fleshy stench of a decayed conscience.

“Alec,” I said, “what can you tell me about the deaths

of Kara Rider, Peter Stimovich, Jason Warren, and Pamela Stokes?”

He sighed. “When I was a boy, I was attacked by a nest of yellow jackets. I was walking along a lake, and I have no idea where they came from, but then, like a mirage, they surrounded me and swarmed my body in this great big cloud of black and yellow. Through the cloud I could just make out my parents and some neighbors rushing down the sand toward me, and I wanted to tell them it was all right. It was fine. But then the bees stung. A thousand needles pierced my flesh and drank from my blood, and the pain was so excruciating it was orgasmic.” He looked at me as a drop of sweat fell from his nose and landed on his chin. “I was eleven years old and I had my first orgasm, right there in my swimsuit, as a thousand yellow jackets drank my blood.”

Lief frowned and leaned back against the wall.

“The last time it was wasps,” Dolquist said.

“It was yellow jackets.”

“You said wasps, Alec.”

“I said yellow jackets,” Alec said mildly and looked back at me. “Have you ever been stung?”

I shrugged. “Probably once or twice when I was a little kid. I can’t remember.”

There was a silence then which lasted several minutes. Alec Hardiman sat across from me and looked at me as if he were considering how I’d look laid out in sections on a piece of bone-white china, forks and knives and a full service tray at his disposal.

I looked back, aware that he’d refuse to answer any questions I had at the moment.

When he spoke, I didn’t see his lips move until afterward, in memory.

“Could you adjust my glasses, Patrick?”

I looked at Lief and he shrugged. I leaned forward and pushed them back up to Alec’s eyes and he tilted his nostrils toward the space of bare skin between my gloved palm and shirt cuff, sniffed audibly.

I removed my hand.

“Did you have sex this morning, Patrick?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I can smell her sex on your hand,” he said.

Lief came off the wall just enough so that I could see the warning in his face.

“I want you to understand something,” Hardiman said. “I want you to understand that there are choices. You can make the right one or the wrong one, but the choice will be presented. Not everyone you love can live.”

I tried to get some saliva working through the sand stiffening in my throat and against my tongue. “Diandra Warren’s son is dead because she put you away. That one I get. What about the other victims?”

He hummed, softly at first, and I couldn’t recognize the tune until he lowered his head and the volume rose slightly. “Send in the Clowns.”

“The other victims,” I repeated. “Why did they have to die, Alec?”

“Isn’t it bliss?” he sang.

“You brought me here for a reason,” I said.

“Don’t you approve…”

“Why did they die, Alec?” I said.

“One who keeps tearing around…” His voice was thin and high. “One who can’t move…”

“Inmate Hardiman—”

“So send in the clowns…”

I looked at Dolquist, then at Lief.

Hardiman wagged a finger at me. “Don’t bother,” he sang, “they’re here.”

And he laughed. He laughed hard, his vocal cords booming, his mouth wide and spittle forming at the corners, and his eyes even wider as they remained on me. The air in the cell seemed to go into that mouth with him, as if he were sucking it down into his lungs until it filled his whole body and we’d be left airless and gasping.

Then his mouth clamped shut and his eyes glazed and he looked as reasonable and gentle as a small-town librarian.

“Why did you bring me here, Alec?”

“You’ve tamed the cowlick, Patrick.”

“What?”

He turned his head, spoke to Lief. “Patrick used to have an awful cowlick near the back of his head. It stuck out like a broken finger.”