Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

My father’s smile, so rare, was a thing of wonder.

“I didn’t mean to bust the window,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, Dad.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re not mad?”

He shook his head.

“I—”

“You did great, Patrick. You did great,” he whispered. He took my head to his broad chest and kissed my cheek, smoothed my cow lick with his palm. “You make me proud.”

It was the only time I ever heard those words from my father.

“Clowns,” Bolton said.

“Clowns,” I said.

“Clowns, yeah,” Phil said.

“Okay,” Bolton said slowly. “Clowns,” he repeated and nodded to himself.

“No shit,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He nodded again and then turned his huge head, looked directly at me. “You are, I’m assuming, fucking kidding me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“No.”

“We’re perfectly and completely friggin’ serious,” Phil said.

“Jesus.” Bolton leaned against the sink, looked over at Angie. “Tell me you’re not part of this, Ms. Gennaro. You, at least, seem like a person of some rationality.”

She tightened the belt on her robe. “I don’t know what to believe.” She shrugged her shoulders in the direction of Phil and me. “They seem pretty certain.”

“Listen for a second—”

He crossed to me in three large steps. “No. No. We’ve blown the surveillance because of you, Mr. Kenzie. You call me over here and say you’ve cracked the case. You’ve—”

“I didn’t—”

“—figured it all out and you need to see me right away. So I come over here and he’s here”—he pointed at Phil—“and now they’re here”—he jerked his head at Devin and Oscar—“and any hopes we had of suckering Evandro into this place are shot because it looks like a fucking law enforcement convention in here.” He paused for breath. “And I could have lived with all that as long as we were, oh, I don’t know, getting somewhere. But, no, you give me clowns.”

“Mr. Bolton,” Phil said, “we’re serious here.”

“Oh. Good. Let me see if I have this right—twenty years ago, two circus performers with bushy hair and rubber pants pull up beside you in a van while you’re walking to a Little League game and—”

“From,” I said.

“What?”

“We were walking back from the game,” Phil said.

“Mea culpa,” Bolton said and gave us a bow and flourish. “Mea maxima fucking culpa, tu morani.”

“I’ve never been insulted in Latin before,” Devin said to Oscar. “You?”

“Mandarin,” Oscar said. “Never Latin.”

“Fine,” Bolton said. “You were accosted by two circus performers coming back from a game and because—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—because Alec Hardiman sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ during the prison interview you think he was one of those clowns and that means, of course, that he’s been killing people to get back at you for escaping that day?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Oh, well, thank heaven. Look, Mr. Kenzie, twenty-five years ago I asked out Carol Yaeger of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she laughed in my face. But that doesn’t—”

“Hard to believe,” Devin said.

“—mean I thought it perfectly logical to wait a couple of decades and kill everyone she ever knew.”

“Bolton,” I said, “I’d love to keep watching you dig yourself a hole here, but time is short. You bring the Hardiman, Rugglestone, and Morrison files like I asked?”

He patted his briefcase. “Right here.”

“Open ’em.”

“Mr. Kenzie—”

“Please.”

He opened the briefcase, pulled out the files, and set them on the kitchen table. “And?”

“Check the ME’s report on Rugglestone. Specifically look at the section on unexplained toxins.”

He found it, adjusted his glasses. “Yes?”

“What was found in Rugglestone’s facial lacerations?”

He read: “‘Lemon extract; hydrogen peroxide; talc, mineral oil, stearic acid, peg-thirty-two, triethanolamine, lanolin…all consistent with ingredients of white Pan-Cake makeup.’” He looked up. “So?”

“Read Hardiman’s file. Same section.”

He flipped a few pages and did.

“So? They were both wearing makeup.”

“White Pan-Cake,” I said. “The kind mimes use,” I said. “And clowns.”

“I see what—”

“Cal Morrison was found with the same properties under his fingernails.”

He opened the Morrison file, leafed through it until he found it.

“Still,” he said.

“Find the photograph of the van found outside the murder site—it was registered to Rugglestone.”

He leafed through the file. “Here it is.”

“It’s missing the windshield,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But the van had been hosed clean, probably that day. Sometime between the hosing and the time the police found it, someone chucked some cinderblocks through the windshield, probably while Rugglestone was being murdered.”

“So?”

“So, I’d marked the windshield. I threw the baseball and put a spiderweb in the center. That was the only thing to suggest Hardiman and Rugglestone were the clowns. Remove the mark, remove the motive.”

“What’s your point?”

I didn’t truly believe it until I said it.

“I think EEPA killed Charles Rugglestone.”

“He’s right,” Devin said eventually.

The hail had turned to rain shortly after eight, and the rain froze almost as soon as it hit. Streaks of water bled down Angie’s windows and rippled into veins of crackling ice before our eyes.

Bolton had sent an agent back to the RV to make copies of the Rugglestone, Hardiman, and Morrison files, and we’d spent the last hour reading them in Angie’s dining room.

Bolton said, “I’m not so sure.”

“Please,” Angie said. “It’s all here if you look at it right. Everyone goes on the assumption that Alec Hardiman, loaded up on PCP, does the work of ten men when he kills Rugglestone. And if I was convinced Hardiman had killed several other people, I probably would have been swayed, too. But he had nerve damage in his left hand, seconal in his system, and was found passed out. Now, you look at Rugglestone’s wounds with the idea that maybe ten people—or, say, seven—were involved, and it makes perfect sense.”