Ryerson Biergarten asked the same desk sergeant he'd talked to the previous morning, "What call is Captain Lucas on? Where?"
And the sergeant, smiling, answered, "What are you going to do-go and watch?"
Ryerson took a breath, counted to three silently, then said, calling up his most authoritarian tones, "This is a matter of life and death, Sergeant. If you don't cooperate with me-" He stopped. When he went on a moment later, his authoritarian tone had changed to one of urgency. "Where on Ormond Street is he? What number?"
The sergeant was flabbergasted. "I-I never said anything . . ." He turned to the uniformed cops behind him. "Hey, you guys are witnesses, I never said anything to him about where the captain is; you'll vouch for me, right?"
The uniformed cops, a half-dozen of them, all looked up in unison, and confusion.
"Never mind," Ryerson said, "I know where to find him." And, with Creosote tucked under his arm, he went to his Woody, parked in front of the station, and drove north, toward Ormond Street, and the house where Lilian and Frank Janus used to live.
~ * ~
"Spurling?" called Guy Mallory from the bathroom of the Janus house; two ambulance attendants had just lifted Lilian Janus onto a stretcher. "Coming through," said the lead man, and Mallory stepped out of their way, into the bedroom. "Spurling?" he called again.
Officer McGuire, standing guard near the bedroom door, offered, "He left a few minutes ago, Sergeant."
"He left a few minutes ago?" Mallory was incredulous. "Did he say where in the hell he was going?"
McGuire nodded. "Yes, sir. He had to use the john downstairs, sir."
"Uh-huh," Mallory said. "And how about Captain Lucas?"
"He left the house, sir."
Mallory fumed, "What is this-the Keystone Kops?"
"Yes, sir," McGuire said.
"Are you trying to be funny, Officer?"
"No, sir."
Mallory nodded at Frank Janus's naked body in front of the bed. "Cover that, would you, McGuire," he said.
"Forensics hasn't been through here yet, sir."
Mallory rolled his eyes. "Everyone's an expert!" he whispered.
"Yes, sir," McGuire said.
There were several people in the room-a police photographer who was stepping gingerly around to line up shots, a technician just beginning to dust everything in the room for fingerprints, a woman kneeling over what had been incorrectly presumed to be the corpse of Lilian Janus; the woman had a small glass specimen holder in one hand and what looked like a flat-bladed scalpel in the other; she was scraping the inside of the corpse's left arm with it.
"Uh, miss?" Mallory said.
McGuire offered, "She's with the M.E.'s office, Sergeant."
"I'll ask the questions, McGuire."
"Yes, sir."
The woman looked around at Mallory. "I am with the Medical Examiner's Office, Detective."
"Okay," Mallory said, "but would you mind telling me what the hell you're doing? You've got the body-what in God's name would you need with-"
"They're fresh," the woman said, smiling an apology for interrupting him. "The scrapings are fresh tissue, more or less. It's going to be another hour, maybe two, before the M.E. starts his autopsy, and by then this body will be well into the process of degeneration. Cellular structure is very fragile, Detective, especially if you intend to do the kinds of tests with it that we think are going to be required. What we've got here is something very, very strange."
Spurling appeared in the doorway and stopped next to McGuire. McGuire said, "Yes, sir,” and Spurling looked confusedly at him; then he grinned, pleased. "You're a good man, McGuire," he said.
"Yes, sir," McGuire said, and the heel of his foot hit the floor.
Mallory called sharply, "You're not in the army here, McGuire. Loosen up."
"Yes, sir," McGuire said.
"And cut out the damned 'yes sirs' and `no sirs.'
"Certainly," McGuire said.
Spurling said, "There's some bozo downstairs looking for Captain Lucas."
Chapter Nineteen
Ryerson, standing on the sidewalk halfway to the front porch steps at the Janus home, was fighting to maintain some appearance of composure and normalcy.
It was a difficult fight, but so far he was winning it.
Most of those around him were uniformed cops. Pat Farrel, the reporter for the Buffalo Evening News, was there, too, waiting impatiently for word from someone on what was going on. "Mr. Biergarten," he'd said when Ryerson had appeared at the house and had asked one of the uniforms if he could see Captain Lucas, "what would interest a psychic investigator here? Does this have some-thing to do with that 'psychic storm' you talked about two days ago?" and Ryerson had been forced by what he was seeing to ignore him.
The Janus home was in a fashionable west side neighborhood. It was a big, cedar-sided contemporary house surrounded by similar houses. The lawn was elegantly manicured, the landscaping a tad ostentatious, though not overbearing, and the whole effect was one of calculated neatness, and taste.
But that was not all that Ryerson was seeing.
He was also seeing demons.
Demons slavering at the windows; demons slithering through doors; demons poking their awful heads from the chimney; demons squatting beneath the shrubs.
And for Ryerson, the really hellish thing of it all was this: he knew that these demons were real. As real as the house, as real as the grass, as real as his damned argyle socks.
As real as Joan believed them to be.
Murderously, obscenely real!
They were not merely something that his incredibly sensitive and creative psyche had manufactured to give his feelings palpability-something to touch and hold on to because feelings all by themselves can slip away in an instant. That had happened before; his mind's eye had created for him what his feelings told him were real. In Boston, at a house plagued by classic poltergeist-type hauntings, he had seen the grinning head of a young girl bouncing like a basketball from room to room, and from that was able to link the hauntings to a girl of twelve who lived at the house. But that bouncing head had not been real, and he knew it the moment he saw it. It was a symbol, a representation of reality. He'd been certain of that right from the start.
His only certainty now, in front of the Janus house, was that the world was alive with possibilities. Crawling, slithering, slavering, grinning possibilities.
"Hey," he heard one of the uniformed cops nearby say, though to Ryerson it sounded as if the cop were a million miles away, "you wanta move back a little; this is a crime scene, you know."
Ryerson took no notice of him.
The demons he was seeing were much as he would have imagined them. They were thin and misshapen, fat and smooth and wrinkled, olive-colored and dull orange and very light blue; they were translucent, transparent, beaked, fanged, owl-eyed and eyeless; they crawled, they hopped, they hunkered about on thin greasy thighs; they were monkey-faced, no-faced, two-faced, motionless; they vibrated like water, they sang, they hooted, they were shrill the way bluejays are shrill; they sat on necks, on arms, on heads, their huge crooked organs dangling over noses and mouths; they smelled of the earth, and of death, and of winter air.
They were as present as air.
The uniformed cop said again, "Get out of the way, mister-this is a crime scene!"
"Who the hell is he?" said another one.
"He's looking for Captain Lucas."
Ryerson began to lose it. His body quivered; his mouth opened and closed; his eyes watered from staying open too long.
Guy Mallory appeared in front of him. He said, "Captain Lucas isn't here. I'll tell him you were looking for him. What'd you say your name was?"