THIRTY-NINE

It was her apartment, but it wasn’t, and we didn’t need a crystal ball to know what we would find. She hadn’t answered the door and she hadn’t responded to our knocking at her windows. We knew all we needed to know when the foul stench of rancid flesh seeped under the door and around the window frames like fog. Old death’s signature is as distinctive as John Hancock’s. I knew that if the fog could get out, flies could get in. The image of her body as the hostess of flies made me sick to my stomach and I covered my mouth to hold back the vomit. That image would be as hard to erase as the stink that filled up my senses.

Fuqua handed me a cell phone. Where was mine? I punched in her number like a silent prayer. Silent or not, God said no, and the call went straight to voicemail.

“It is the Tonton Macoute,” Fuqua said, his hands shaking. Then he turned and kicked in the door. It crumbled into dust as if it were made of chalk and a wave of thick black coffee came pouring out the empty doorway, thousands of cigarette filters riding the surf. Our clothes remained perfectly dry. “Watch out for the Tonton Macoute,” he whispered, his index finger across his lips.

We walked into the apartment. The walls were papered in hate mail, the carpeting covered in tobacco stains and sticky brown resin. There was a makeshift altar in one corner of the living room. On it was a framed photo of Alta Conseco kissing Kristen Jo Winston. The photograph was surrounded by hundreds of Hanukah candles; blue and white wax dripped into a two-foot high mound on the floor. Odd, I thought, this altar was just like the altar in John Tierney’s house, the man who had been accused of kidnapping Sashi Bluntstone. But this wasn’t his basement, or was it?

Fuqua nodded at the altar. “See, see?”

We were in her bedroom now. It was so thick with flies that we breathed them in like black air, but the beating of their wings was only a whisper. John DiNardo was now there with us. He pointed at the bed. Her body lay under a quilt that conformed perfectly to her outline.

“This is how we found her,” he said. “She’s still under there. Look!”

And when Detective DiNardo pulled back the quilt, nothing was in bed but a cell phone.

I didn’t wake up screaming because I’d been complicit in my dream. It was as if I was rooting from the sidelines for me to keep moving ahead, to find what I was looking for, to find an answer. No, I woke up feeling like an old-fashioned percolator. Things were bubbling up inside me. Sure, there was regret over Maya Watson’s suicide, but death had been her choice, a luxury I didn’t think was going to be afforded me. Besides, I didn’t hold with those people who believed that suicide was an act of cowardice. Those were the same people who saw addiction as a moral weakness, the same people who thought of posttraumatic stress as a disease for pussies. Suicide wasn’t exactly an act of heroism either, not in my book. It was an act of control, the ultimate proof of propriety.

I rolled over in bed. Pam was there with me, asleep but lightly so. She was in that rested, semi-conscious state where a soft touch in the right place would lead us down the road to slow building, sleep-drunk sex. Pam was nude and with my body pressing against her back, it would have been easy to touch any number of sensitive spots and to let the dance begin. Instead I put my arm around her abdomen and held on for all I was worth.

“What is it?” she mumbled, rolling onto her back and brushing my cheek with the back of her hand. “What time is it?”

“It’s either very late or very early.” I dragged my thumb over her lips. “Lady’s choice.”

“Late is sexier than early.”

“Then it’s very late. What time did you get in?”

“Past midnight. We’ve got a lot to talk about later,” she said.

“It’s already later.”

She pushed me over onto my back and straddled me. “Later later,” she said. “Some things can wait. Others can’t. Lady’s choice, remember?”

I knew when to keep my mouth shut.