Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

And Gerry’s hand exploded.

And so did mine.

The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one-shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry’s arm and caught the wisps of Danielle’s hair.

Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy.

I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working.

I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand.

My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head.

The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry’s wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck.

Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It’s been nice.

Oscar’s first two shots entered the back of Gerry’s head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back.

The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry’s flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell.

He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil.

Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing.

Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry’s corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it—something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountainous—made me laugh.

Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry’s burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire.

Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn.

Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed.

I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar.

His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment.

“How you doing, Patrick?” he said and smiled broadly.

And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice.

And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.

Epilogue

A month after Gerry Glynn’s death, his killing ground was discovered in what had been the cafeteria of the long-closed Dedham House of Correction. Along with several of his victims’ body parts stored in a half dozen coolers, police also found a list Gerry’d compiled of all the people he’d killed since 1965. Gerry was twenty-seven when he murdered his wife, fifty-eight when he died. In those thirty-one years, he killed—either by himself or with the aid of Charles Rugglestone, Alec Hardiman, or Evandro Arujo—thirty-four people. According to the list.

A police psychologist speculated that the number could actually be higher. Someone of Gerry’s ego, he argued, could easily have differentiated between “worthy” victims and “lesser” ones.

Of the thirty-four, sixteen were runaways, one in Lubbock, Texas, and another in unincorporated Dade County, Florida, just as Bolton had suspected.

Three and a half weeks after his death, Cox Publishers published the true-crime book, The Boston Manglers, by a staff reporter with the News. The book sold fast for two days, and then the discovery was made in Dedham, and people lost interest because even a book produced in twenty-four days wasn’t able to keep up with the times.

An internal police investigation into Gerry Glynn’s death concluded that officers and federal agents had used “necessary, extreme force” when sharpshooters fired fourteen bullets into his body after Oscar’s first three had effectively killed him.

Stanley Timpson was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the Rugglestone case and obstruction of a federal investigation upon arriving at Logan Airport from Mexico.

The state, upon reviewing the Rugglestone case, decided that since the only witnesses to Rugglestone’s murder were a catatonic mental patient, an unhinged alcoholic, and an AIDS victim who wouldn’t live to see a trial and because there was no longer any physical evidence left, that they’d leave prosecution of Timpson to federal authorities.

Last I heard, Timpson was planning to enter a plea on the obstruction charge in exchange for dismissal of the conspiracy.

Alec Hardiman’s attorney petitioned the State Supreme Court for immediate reversal of his client’s conviction and immediate commutation of his prison term due to allegations surfacing against Timpson and EEPA in relation to the Rugglestone murder. The attorney then filed a second suit in civil court against the State of Massachusetts, the current governor and chief of police as well as the men who’d held those positions in 1974. For wrongful imprisonment, the attorney argued, Alec Hardiman was entitled to sixty million dollars—or three million dollars for every year he spent behind bars. His client, the attorney argued, was further victimized by the state when he contracted AIDS due to inferior policing fellow inmates, and should be released immediately while he still had some life left.

A reversal of Hardiman’s decision is currently pending.

Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy were rumored to be hiding out in the Cayman Islands.

Another rumor, rarely reported in the papers, suggested they’d been murdered on the orders of Fat Freddy Constantine. Lieutenant John Kevosky of the Major Crime Unit said, “Negative. Both Kevin and Jack have a history of disappearing when the heat gets turned up. Besides,

Freddy had no reason to kill them. They made him money. They’re hiding out in the Caribbean.” Or not.

Diandra Warren quit her consulting position at Bryce and put her private practice on hiatus.

Eric Gault continues to teach at Bryce, his secret safe for now.

Evandro Arujo’s parents sold a diary their son had written as a teenager to a TV tabloid for $20,000. Producers later sued for return of the money on the basis that the diary revealed the musings of what was, back then, a perfectly healthy mind.