Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little scared.”

The bubble of tension that had hung pregnant in the kitchen popped softly and bled out under the back door.

He laid the gun on the oven top and hoisted himself up on the counter, raised a slightly bemused eyebrow at Bolton.

“So tell me about this guy.”

An agent stuck his head into the kitchen. “Agent Bolton, sir? No signs that anyone’s been tampering with any locks or access areas to the house. We swept for bugs, and it’s clean. Back yard is overgrown and shows no evidence it’s been walked in for at least a month.”

Bolton nodded and the agent left.

“Agent Bolton,” Phil said.

Bolton turned back to him.

“Could you please tell me about this guy who wants to kill me and my wife?”

“Ex, Phil,” Angie said softly. “Ex.”

“Sorry.” He looked at Bolton. “Me and my ex-wife, then?”

Bolton leaned against the fridge as Devin and Oscar settled into chairs and I sat up on the counter on the other side of the oven.

“The man’s name is Evandro Arujo,” Bolton said. “He’s a suspect in four murders in the last month. In every one of these cases, he’s sent photographs to his intended victims or their loved ones.”

“Photos like that one.” Phil indicated the picture of him and Angie which lay on the kitchen table, powdered with fingerprint dust.

“Yes.”

It had been taken recently. Fallen leaves littering the foreground were multicolored. Phil was listening to something Angie was saying, his head down, hers turned toward him as they walked the stretch of grass and pavement which cut through the center of Commonwealth Avenue.

“But there’s nothing threatening about that picture.”

Bolton nodded. “Except that it was taken at all and then sent to Ms. Gennaro. Have you ever heard of Evandro Arujo?”

“No.”

“Alec Hardiman?”

“Nope.”

“Peter Stimovich or Pamela Stokes?”

Phil thought about it. “Both sound vaguely familiar.”

Bolton opened the file in his hand, passed photos of Stimovich and Stokes to him.

Phil’s face darkened. “Wasn’t this guy stabbed to death last week?”

Bolton said, “A lot worse than stabbed.”

“The papers said stabbed,” Phil said. “Something about his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend being a suspect.”

Bolton shook his head. “That’s the story we leaked. Stimovich’s girlfriend had no ex-boyfriend of note.”

Phil held up the Pamela Stokes photo. “She dead, too?”

“Yes.”

Phil rubbed his eyes. “Fuck,” he said and it came out in a ripple as if riding a laugh or a shudder.

“Have you ever met either of them?”

Phil shook his head.

“How about Jason Warren?”

Phil looked over at Angie. “The kid you were trying to protect? The one who died?”

She nodded. She hadn’t spoken much since we arrived. She chainsmoked and stared out the window facing the back yard.

“Kara Rider?” Bolton said.

“She was killed by this asshole too?”

Bolton nodded.

“Jesus.” Phil came off the counter gingerly, as if not sure there’d be a floor waiting to meet him. He crossed stiffly to Angie, took a cigarette from her pack, lit it, and looked down at his ex-wife.

She watched him the way you’d watch someone who’s just been informed he has cancer, not sure if you should give him space to lash out or stay close to catch him if he crumbles.

He placed a hand on her cheek and she leaned into it and something deeply intimate—some acknowledgment of what rooted them to each other—passed between them.

“Mr. Dimassi, did you know Kara Rider?”

Phil withdrew his hand from Angie’s cheek in a slow caress and walked back to the counter.

“I knew her when she was growing up. We all did.”

“Had you seen her recently?”

He shook his head. “Not in three or four years.” He stared at his cigarette, then flicked ash into the sink. “Why us, Mr. Bolton?”

“We don’t know,” Bolton said and there was an edge of desperate irritation in his voice. “We’re hunting Arujo now and his face will be plastered over every newspaper in New England by tomorrow morning. He can’t hide long. We still don’t know why he’s targeting the people he’s targeting, except in the Warren case where we have a possible motive—but at least now we know who he’s targeting and we can watch both you and Ms. Gennaro.”

Erdham came into the kitchen. “Perimeters of both this house and Mr. Dimassi’s apartment building are secure.”

Bolton nodded and rubbed his face with fleshy hands.

“Okay, Mr. Dimassi,” he said, “here it is. Twenty years ago a man named Alec Hardiman murdered his friend, Charles Rugglestone in a warehouse about six blocks from here. We believe that Hardiman and Rugglestone were responsible for a string of murders at the time, the most notorious of which was Cal Morrison’s crucifixion.”

“I remember Cal,” Phil said.

“Did you know him well?”

“No. He was a couple years older than us. I never heard about a crucifixion, though. He was stabbed.”

Bolton shook his head. “Again, a story leaked to the media to buy time and eliminate nutcases who’d confess to killing Hoffa and both Kennedys before breakfast. Morrison was crucified. Six days later, Hardiman went berserk and did the work of ten psychotic men on his partner, Rugglestone. No one knows why, except that both men had large quantities of PCP and alcohol in their systems at the time. Hardiman went to Walpole for life, and twelve years later he took Arujo and turned him into a psychopath. Arujo was relatively innocent when he went in, but now he’s anything but.”

“You see him,” Devin said, “you run, Phil.”

Phil swallowed and gave a small nod.

“Arujo’s been out for six months,” Bolton said. “We believe Hardiman has a contact on the outside, a second killer who either fosters Arujo’s need to kill or vice versa. We’re not positive about this, but we’re leaning that way. For some unknown reason, Hardiman, Arujo, and this unknown third man are pointing us in one direction only—this neighborhood. And they’re pointing us toward certain people—Mr. Kenzie, Diandra Warren, Stan Timpson, Kevin Hurlihy and Jack Rouse—but we don’t know why.”