Fatal Tide Read online

  She told Casey how Tommy had figured out the meaning of the symbol they’d found drawn in blood on Julie’s stomach, representing the horns on a Viking’s helmet, and how a group of pagans, driven out of England over a thousand years ago, had hired Viking ships to bring them to the New World, where they established a settlement in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Once there, they corrupted the Native American people they encountered and controlled them with fear and sorcery until they were defeated by a pair of early Christian missionaries.

  She laid out the evidence that had led them to conclude that St. Adrian’s Academy was, in fact, a sham institution founded to engage in satanic practices and perpetuate evil throughout the world, and that there was a larger plot they were involved in right now, a plot that would culminate on Christmas Eve, and that making it seem like Tommy had murdered Wharton was part of that plot. When she was done, Casey was silent a minute.

  “I know this is all hard to believe,” Dani said.

  “I’m still listening,” Casey said. “And I’m not too arrogant to assume something has to be wrong, just because I don’t understand it.”

  “Good,” Dani said, looking at Tommy, who nodded to her to continue. “I know you might have reasons to doubt what we’re saying, but we’ve had proof. And you haven’t. We have proof. We just can’t show it to you.”

  “Though now would be a very good time for Charlie or Ben to drop by, just for a second,” Tommy said, more loudly than he needed to.

  “Ben Whitehorse?” Casey said. “The Native American guy who was friends with the British art historian who died in the accident? I met him when we had a look around the Gardener place. I liked him.”

  “That’s the guy,” Dani said. “Except that he’s not really a guy at all. That was only the form he chose to take while he was here. Because he needed to give us a message.”

  “He dressed up like an Indian to give you a message?”

  “They have to look like something when they’re here, because if they look like themselves, they’re overwhelmingly beautiful,” Dani said.

  “They?” Casey asked.

  “Angels. Ben is one of them.”

  Casey took a moment before responding, folding his arms across his chest and leaning his head back. “You want me to believe Ben was an angel,” he said. “Walking among us.”

  Tommy and Dani both nodded.

  “You realize what you’re asking me to do, right?” Casey said. “I got a body in the pond, I got surveillance video showing me, pretty clearly, who did it, and now the guy in the surveillance video is telling me the guy in the pond was working for Satan, and that angels are telling him what to do. As an investigator with the district attorney’s office, my job is to look into crimes, find evidence of who did it, and if I’m lucky, I find a motive too. Right now, it’s all there, right in front of me. It depends on whether I believe my eyes … or I believe you.”

  Casey had been skeptical of Dani at first, and of her role as a consulting psychiatrist for the DA’s office. He was a veteran detective who’d transferred to Westchester from Providence, Rhode Island, under duress after rubbing his superiors the wrong way one too many times. In his opinion, it didn’t matter if a bad guy was criminally insane or mentally competent to stand trial or participate in his own defense—if they did the crime, they had to be punished for it and put away.

  Dani had proven herself and earned his trust, but now, she knew, she was asking him to give her even more.

  “No. What it depends on is if you believe in them,” Dani said. She reached over and rubbed Tommy’s neck, waiting for the detective to answer. Tommy reached up and gave her hand a squeeze, a gesture of solidarity.

  “Do you, Detective?” Tommy asked him. “Do you believe in angels?”

  Casey thought for a long time before answering.

  “Lucky for you, I do,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table and staring into his coffee cup before looking up. “This is something I never told nobody, except my wife. Anybody else woulda thought I was nuts. A couple years ago … Wow—ten years ago. More than a couple. We got a call. All hands on deck. Warehouse fire on Federal Hill. Italian neighborhood in Providence. Huge fire. The fire’s in one of the old jewelry supply warehouses that got a second life as artist studios, but you’re not supposed to live there. It’s not zoned residential. So it’s crazy. We got engine companies from Cranston and Warwick and Pawtucket, they’re all pouring water on the building, it’s night, lights are flashing, we got command and control on the radio giving instructions and maybe a couple thousand people on the street watching. But the fire’s out of control. Nothing they can do, really. And there’s a woman the firefighters pulled out of the building with smoke inhalation, but she comes around and she starts screaming, ‘My babies! My babies! My twins are in there!’ But the assessment is, the building is going to come down any minute. Nobody knows what to do. The firefighters want to go in but they can’t. They got orders not to.”

  He looked from Dani to Tommy and back to make sure they were still with him.

  “So before anybody can stop him, this guy, this big African American guy, puts his shirt over his head and runs into the building. Everybody figures he’s a goner, but nobody is allowed to go after him. Five minutes later he comes running out with something under each arm, wrapped in blankets. He hands them to the EMTs. And they’re the woman’s kids. Everybody starts fussing over the kids, but I go up to the guy to see if he’s all right. And he looks me in the eye, and I knew. I just knew. He was different. He wasn’t …” Casey shook his head. “He was an angel. He was watching over those babies that night.”

  Dani could see tears welling up in the corners of his eyes.

  “I kept hearing that woman’s voice. ‘My babies. My babies. My twins are in there.’ I can still hear her. It’s something I’ll never forget. And I can remember, clear as a bell, how helpless I felt. How I broke down, because there was nothing I could do. All you can do is stand there, thinking about what’s happening. I’m not saying I was praying, but I was saying, in my head, Please, somebody—please, God, somebody do something.”

  Casey reached into his back pocket and grabbed a clean white handkerchief, which he used to dry his eyes and blow his nose. Dani realized there was something about that she really liked. Men who still carried linen handkerchiefs. She made a mental note to buy some for Tommy.

  “If you believe in angels, then you understand that demons are fallen angels,” Tommy said. “They can take any form they want. That wasn’t me you saw in the video. That was a demon.”

  “We can prove that,” Dani said.

  Tommy turned to her. “We can?”

  She nodded. “Tommy figured out that demons show up as ice-cold forms on an infrared camera if you recalibrate it to read thermal images below the default bottom range. Humans show up as red. Demons are blue. They’re the opposite of life. The absence of warmth. A spiritual vacuum. And you have infrared cameras covering the pond, don’t you?” she asked Tommy.

  “I certainly hope I do,” he replied.

  Tommy found the infrared file for the night before and fast-forwarded to ten minutes after three. Dani suggested he run both the video and infrared files side by side to prove they’d filmed the same event at the same time. As she’d predicted, the infrared footage showed Wharton as a reddish orange color and Tommy, or the demon in the form of Tommy, as deep blue.

  “Remember the two figures we saw at the school, one red, one blue?” she asked Tommy.

  “Ghieri and Wharton,” Tommy said. “You think Ghieri killed Wharton?”

  “It could have been some other demon,” Dani said. “But yeah. I think he did. He must have.”

  “Why would Ghieri want to kill Wharton?”

  “To set you up,” Casey said. “To get you out of the way. And it probably would have worked. If I hadn’t gotten the call to that fire ten years ago.”

  “Whatever is happening in two days, they obviousl
y don’t need Wharton anymore,” Dani said. “Do you think he knew Ghieri is a demon?”

  “He knows now,” Tommy said.

  “How would he not know?” Casey asked.

  “There’s human evil, and there’s supernatural evil,” Dani told him. “The demons mislead and deceive. They use the people who believe in them. Humans are disposable.”

  “All the time?”

  “No way to know,” Dani said. “I’m not sure it matters, necessarily. And they’re gathering strength. Tommy?”

  Tommy showed the detective the images he’d gotten flying the drone over the school, and the evidence he’d uncovered of demonic activity there. He showed him the security footage of the beasts in the woods, waiting in the shadows.

  “Is that everything?” Casey said.

  “Probably not,” Dani said, sitting down. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s enough,” Casey said. “You know that angel—back at the warehouse fire? After he rescued those kids … he said something to me.”

  “What?” Dani asked.

  “He said, ‘You gotta save the babies. Next time you’ll know what to do. You’ll know.’ He said it twice. And now, you’re asking me to help save the babies. This is the next time. I know. He was right. I can’t even say how I know, but I know. This is the next time.”

  “You’re going to help us?” Dani said.

  Casey nodded. “How could I not?”

  “I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but what do we do with the body?” Tommy asked.

  “Unfortunately, I know the answer to that question. Trunk of my car,” Casey said, rising from his chair and gesturing for Tommy to follow him. “I know a mob guy in Providence who can take care of it. He owes me a favor.”

  “This should even things up,” Tommy said.

  “Not even close,” Casey said, suddenly eying the baked goods on the counter. “Those muffins look good. You mind?”

  “Help yourself,” Dani said, offering Casey the muffin Tommy had prepared for her.

  “Not that one,” Tommy said, grabbing the muffin and hiding it behind his back. “That one’s bad.”

  “That’s the one you wanted me to eat,” Dani said.

  “Yeah, but it’s cold now.” He took another muffin from the tin and handed it to Casey. “This one’s even better. It has more blueberries.”

  Casey took it and examined it closely. “I can’t believe I’m going to be driving around Providence, Rhode Island, with a dead body in the trunk of my car,” he exclaimed. “Though it’s probably as good a place as any. And better than some.”

  22.

  December 22

  6:59 p.m. EST / 11:59 p.m. GMT

  Tommy helped Casey load the body into the trunk of his car. The detective returned to the house to make his good-byes and grab another muffin for the road. Tommy checked the water temperature in the isolation tank.

  “You ready?” Tommy said as Reese walked around the tank. “You didn’t feel at all claustrophobic the last time?”

  Reese shook his head. “I didn’t know a person could float in twelve inches of water.”

  “It’s about the same salinity as the Great Salt Lake,” Tommy said.

  “What if I fall asleep and roll over?” Reese asked.

  “You won’t,” Tommy said. “People fall asleep in bathtubs all the time, and they don’t drown unless they’re drunk or on drugs. Which you’re not, right?”

  Reese smiled. “After all this, I don’t even want to take aspirin.”

  “There you go,” Tommy said.

  “Let’s not overreact,” Dani said. “Prescription drugs save millions of lives every year. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

  “Speaking of which,” Reese said, stepping into the tank.

  “We’ll be right here. And remember, there’s a microphone inside the tank. If we hear you snoring, we’ll open the lid,” Dani said. “There are speakers in there too. If you call out, we’ll hear you and turn them on, and then you can hear us. Okay? Again, if you don’t like it, we can stop.”

  Reese smiled feebly and took off the bathrobe Tommy had loaned him.

  “Done it once,” Reese said, taking a deep breath. “It’s like looking in the mirror for as long as you can. After fifteen seconds, one begins to feel a bit awkward and ridiculous, but it’s just you, being alone with you.”

  “The part that bothers me is how if I raise my right hand, the guy in the mirror raises his left hand,” Tommy said. “That means no matter how hard you try, you never actually see yourself the way other people see you. Apropos of nothing. Anyway, try to relax.”

  “We can do this,” the boy said. He still looked apprehensive.

  He got in, and Dani lowered the lid. She tested the microphone to make sure they could communicate with each other. Then she switched on the music—the fourth Brandenburg Concerto, which Reese had chosen to listen to before the transition to complete silence in the tank. If he wanted to think about his brother, he could, Dani said again, but he didn’t have to. She told him this time he’d have thirty minutes of silence, and then she’d start the music again, softly at first, then louder to bring him back up to full awareness.

  “Let’s make it an hour,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “All right then. Your microphone is on, so we can hear you, but I’m turning mine off so you won’t hear anything from us unless you ask us first.”

  She turned off the microphone on the control panel, then turned toward Tommy.

  “You think it’ll work this time?” he asked.

  “Worth a try. With all the visual and digital electronic clutter in the world today, it can’t hurt to unplug a little.”

  “It’s sort of like a time machine,” Tommy said, staring at the giant egg amid the flat-screen televisions and gaming consoles and classic arcade video games in his man cave. “It doesn’t just block out noise and light. It blocks out the twenty-first century. People are afraid of silence. Everybody has to be busy and entertained all the time. I’m as guilty of that as the next guy. You ever go winter camping?”

  “In the cold? Outdoors?”

  “That’s generally the way it’s done,” he said, amused by her timidity. “It’s only cold if you’re not dressed properly. I’ll go sometimes by myself, when there’s a full moon and snow on the ground and all the leaves are off the trees, and I’ll camp in the middle of a swamp—”

  “A swamp?”

  “It’s frozen,” Tommy said. “There’re no mosquitoes. You’ve never seen light like that. You could read a book in it. I’ll sit there, where nobody has ever been before, miles and miles from anybody, and there’s not a sound. Nothing.”

  “And you’re not scared?”

  “What would I be scared of?”

  “I don’t know. What if you had a heart attack? Or twisted your ankle and froze to death?”

  “If I’m gonna have a heart attack, I can’t think of a better place,” he said.

  “You’re serious.”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “If you could live in any century in history, which one would you want to live in?” Dani asked him.

  “Whichever one you were in,” Tommy said, taking her in his arms and kissing her.

  The kiss was long, soulful, and fully reciprocated. Tommy broke off after a moment and pointed at the egg, whispering, “We’re not exactly alone.”

  “No,” Dani whispered back, “but we will be. One day. Right?”

  “Promise,” Tommy said. It would have been the perfect time to produce the engagement ring, but the ring was, as they spoke, in his pants pocket inside a smashed blueberry muffin—not quite the presentation he had in mind.

  Edmond Stratton-Mallins gazed out the window at the rain in a flat on Lowndes Street, in the Belgravia section of London. It was approaching midnight. The flat was one of a dozen private apartments he had access to in cities throughout the world, now that he wa
s one of the Selected. He’d sent his housekeeper, Mrs. Carlyle, and his butler, Mr. Simons, a note saying only that all was well. He didn’t tell them where he was. And he hadn’t spoken to Reese.

  Yet staring out the window at the rain, he wished it would turn to snow so he might have a white Christmas. Sentimentality was an emotion boys selected into an elite class of leaders could not indulge, but he was alone and no one would know. Edmond found himself thinking of his brother. This would be the first Christmas they hadn’t spent together. The best memories they had of their parents were the ones of Christmas Eve, attending the candlelight services at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill, sitting in the Chapel of All Souls and staring up at the dome and the quire where the clergy sat. He remembered singing carols and waiting for the massive bells above them to chime that the service was over and it was time to hurry home to bed, because in the morning there would be presents. He could imagine how angry Dr. Ghieri would be if he knew Edmond was feeling nostalgic about Christmas—another sign of weakness. But he’d loved waiting at the top of the stairs with his brother until his mother or father gave the all-clear sign, and they’d run down to find what Santa had left them under the tree. Edmond hadn’t cared that his presents were always identical to his brother’s. Two of everything—better for battling each other. When they were older, and their parents were gone, Mrs. Carlyle and Mr. Simons had tried to keep up those traditions, though they adapted with the times—the best part of Christmas Day, to young Reese and young Edmond, had been opening up the latest video games and playing each other all day long, to their hearts’ content.

  They had always been the best of friends, up until the beginning of this year, when Dr. Ghieri, the St. Adrian’s psychologist, had them both take a special test. Ghieri had called Edmond in afterward and told him, in strictest confidence, that he’d outscored his brother by a significant margin. He was not to tell Reese.