Hemlock Bay

13

Quantico

Savich was seated in his small office in the Jefferson dorm at the FBI academy when two agents ushered in Marilyn Warluski, who’d borne a child by her cousin Tommy Tuttle, now deceased, the child’s whereabouts unknown. They’d nabbed her getting on a Greyhound bus in Bar Harbor, Maine, headed for Nova Scotia. Since she’d been designated a material witness, and Savich wanted to keep her stashed away, they’d brought her in a FBI Black Bell Jet to Quantico.

He’d never met her, but he’d seen her photo, knew she was poorly educated, and guessed that she was not very bright. He saw that she looked, oddly, even younger than in her photo, that she’d gained at least twenty pounds, and that her hair, cropped short in the photo, was longer and hung in oily hanks to her shoulders. She looked more tired than scared. No, he was wrong. What she looked was defeated, all hope quashed.

“Ms. Warluski,” he said in his deep, easy voice, waving her to a chair as he said her name. The two agents left the office, closing the door behind them. Savich gently pressed a button on the inside of the middle desk drawer, and in the next room, two profilers sitting quietly could also hear them speak.

“My name is Dillon Savich. I’m with the FBI.”

“I don’t know nothin’,” Marilyn Warluski said.

Savich smiled at her and seated himself again behind the desk.

He was silent for several moments, watched her fidget in that long silence. She said finally, her voice jumpy, high with nerves, “Just because you’re good-lookin’ doesn’t mean I’m gonna tell you anythin’, mister.”

This was a kick. “Hey, my wife thinks I’m good-looking, but I’m wondering, since you said it, if you’re just trying to butter me up.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “you’re good-lookin’ all right, and I heard one of the lady cops on the airplane say you’re a hunk. They were thinkin’ that a sexy guy will make me talk, so they got you.”

“Well,” Savich said, “just maybe that’s so.” He paused a fraction of a second, then said, his voice unexpectedly hard, “Have you ever seen the Ghouls, Marilyn?”

He thought she’d keel over in her chair. So she knew about the Ghouls. She paled to a sickly white, looked ready to bolt.

“They’re not here, Marilyn.”

She shook her head back and forth, back and forth, whispering, “There’s no way you could know about the Ghouls. No way at all. Ghouls are bad, real bad.”

“Didn’t Tammy tell you that I was there in the barn, that I saw them, even shot at them?”

“No, she didn’t tell me… ah, shit. I don’t know nothin’, you hear me?”

“Okay, she didn’t tell you that I saw them and she didn’t tell you my name, which is interesting since she knows it. But she did tell you that she wanted to have at me, didn’t she?”

Marilyn’s lips were seamed tight. She shook her head and said “Oh, yeah, and she will. She called you that creepy FBI fucker. I don’t know why she didn’t tell me that you saw the Ghouls.”

“Maybe she doesn’t trust you.”

“Oh, yeah, Tammy trusts me. She doesn’t have anybody else now. She’ll get you, mister, she will.”

“Just so you know, Marilyn, I’m the one who shot her, the one who killed Tommy. I didn’t want to, but they left me no choice. They had two kids there, and they were going to kill them. Young boys, Marilyn, and they were terrified. Tommy and Tammy had kidnapped them, beaten them, and they were going to murder them, like they’ve murdered many young boys all across the country. Did you know that? Did you know your cousins were murderers?”

Marilyn shrugged. Savich saw a rip beneath the right arm of her brown, cracked leather jacket. “They’re my kin. I could miss Tommy-seein’ as how he’s dead now-but he killed our baby, cracked its poor little head right open, so I was really mad at him for a long time. Tommy was hard, real hard. He was always doin’ things you didn’t expect, mean things, things to make you scream. You killed him. He was one of a kind, Tommy was. Tammy’s right, you’re a creepy fucker.”

Savich didn’t respond, just nodded, waiting.

“You shouldn’t have shot Tammy like you did, tearing her arm all up so they had to saw it off. You shouldn’t have been there in my barn in the first place. It wasn’t none of your damned business.”

He smiled at her, sat forward, his palms flat on his desk. “Of course it’s my business. I’m a cop, Marilyn. You know, I could have killed Tammy, not just shot her arm off. If I had killed her in the barn then she wouldn’t have killed that little boy outside Chevy Chase. Either she did it or the Ghouls did it. Maybe the Ghouls did kill the boy, since there was a circle. Do the Ghouls have to have a circle, Marilyn? You don’t know? Were you with her when she took that boy? Did you help her murder him?”

Marilyn shrugged her shoulders again. “Nope, I didn’t even know what she was going to do, not really. She left me at this grungy motel on the highway and told me to stay put or she’d bang me up real bad. She looked real happy when she got back. There was lots of blood on her nurse’s uniform; she said she’d have to find somethin’ else to wear. She thought it was neat that there was blood on the uniform, said it was a-pro-pos or somethin’ like that. Now, I’m not goin’ to say any more. I already said too much. I want to leave now.”

“You know, Marilyn, your cousin’s very dangerous. She could turn on you, like this.” He snapped his fingers, saw her cower in the chair, saw her shudder. He said, “How would you like to be ripped apart?”

“She wouldn’t turn on me. She’s known me all my life. I’m her cousin, her ma and mine were sisters, at least half-sisters. They wasn’t real sure since their pa was always cattin’ around.”

“Why did Tammy pretend to be Timmy?”

Marilyn focused her eyes on the pile of books along the side wall of the office and didn’t answer. Savich started to leave it for the moment since it obviously upset her, when she burst out, “She wanted me, you know, but she weren’t no dyke and so she played with me only when she was dressed like Timmy, but never when she was Tammy.”

For an instant, Savich was too startled to say a word. What a wild twist. He said finally, “Okay then, tell me what kind of shape Tammy is in right now.”

That brought Marilyn up straight in her chair. “No thanks to you she’s going to be okay, at least she kept telling me that. But she hurts real bad and her shoulder looks all raw and swollen. She went to a pharmacy late one night, just when they was closing, and got the guy to give her some antibiotics and pain pills. He nearly puked when he saw her shoulder.”

“I didn’t hear about any robbery in a pharmacy,” Savich said slowly. They’d been looking, but hadn’t gotten any news as yet.

“That’s because Tammy whacked the guy after she got the medicine from him, tore the place up. She said that’d make the cops go after the local druggies.”

“Where was this, Marilyn?”

“In northern New Jersey somewhere. I don’t remember the name of that crummy little town.”

Local law enforcement hadn’t connected the pharmacist’s murder to the Tammy Tuttle bulletin the FBI had circulated all over the eastern seaboard. Well, at least now they’d find out everything the local cops had on the murder. He said, “Where did Tammy go after you went off to Bar Harbor?”

“She said she wanted some sun so’s it would heal her shoulder. She was going down to the Caribbean to get herself well. No, I don’t know where; she wouldn’t tell me. She said there were lots of islands down there and she’d just find the one that was best for her. Of course she didn’t have enough money, so she robbed this guy and his wife in a real fancy house in Connecticut. Got three thousand and change. That’s when she told me she’d be all right and I could take off.”

“Naturally she’s going to call you, let you know how she’s doing?”

Marilyn nodded.

“Where will she call you?”

“At my boyfriend’s, in Bar Harbor. But I’m not there anymore, am I? My boyfriend will tell her that the cops came around and I left.”

That was true enough, Savich thought, no hope for it. He just hoped that Tammy wouldn’t call until they’d found out where she was in the Caribbean.

Marilyn said, “I’ll bet she really wants to kill you bad because of what you done to her. She’ll come back when she’s really well, and she’ll take you down. Tammy’s the meanest female in the world. She beat the shit out of me every time I saw her when we was growin’ up. She’ll get you, Dillon Savich. You’re nuthin’ compared to Tammy.”

“What are the Ghouls, Marilyn?”

Marilyn Warluski seemed to grow smaller right in front of him. She was pressed against the back of her chair, her shoulders hunched forward. “They’re bad, Mr. Savich. They’re really bad.”

“But what are they?”

“Tammy said she found them when she and Tommy were hiding out in some caves in the Ozarks a couple years ago. That’s in Arkansas, you know. It was real dark, she told me, real dark in that stinkin’ cave, smelled like bat shit, and Tommy was out takin’ a leak, and she was alone and then, all of a sudden, the cave filled with weird white light and then the Ghouls came.”

“They didn’t hurt her?”

Marilyn shook her head.

“What else did she say?”

“Said she knew they were the Ghouls, just knew, that somehow they’d got inside her head and told her their name, then told her that they needed blood, lots of young blood, and then they laughed and told her they were counting on her, and then they just winked out. That’s what Tammy said: they laughed, spoke in her head, and just ‘winked out.’ ”

“But what are they, Marilyn? Do you have any idea?”

She was silent for the longest time, then she whispered, “Tammy told me just a couple of days ago that the Ghouls were pissed off at her because she and Tommy hadn’t given them their young blood in the barn, that if Tommy was still alive, they’d eat him right up.”

“Do you think that’s why Tammy got that kid? So the Ghouls could have their young blood?”

She didn’t say anything, just looked at him and slowly nodded. Then she started crying, hunched over, her bowed head in her hands.

“Do you know anything else, Marilyn?”

She shook her head. Savich believed her. He also understood why she was shivering. He was close to shivering himself. He had goose bumps on his arms.

Two FBI agents escorted Marilyn Warluski out of Savich’s office. She would remain here at Quantico, a material witness and the FBI’s guest until Savich and Justice made a decision about what to do with her.

He was standing by his desk, deep in thought, looking out the window toward Hogan’s Alley, the all-American town that the FBI Academy had created and used to train their agents in confronting and catching criminals, when Jeffers, a profiler in the Behavioral Sciences, housed three floors down here at Quantico, said in his slow, Alabama drawl even before he cleared the doorway, “This is about the strangest shared delusion I’ve ever heard, Savich. But what are the things to them? How do they interact with Tammy Tuttle? Marilyn said Tammy told her the Ghouls got in her head and told her to do things.”

“What we’ve got to do is predict what Tammy Tuttle will do next given this belief of hers in the Ghouls,” said Jane Bitt, a senior profiler who’d lasted nearly five years without burning out.

Jane Bitt came around Jeffers and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest. “Lots of other monsters but not anything like this. Tammy Tuttle is a monster. She’s got monsters inside her-monsters within a monster. The problem is that we don’t have any markers, any clues to give us even a glimmer of an idea of what we’re working with here. We’re faced with something we’ve never seen before.”

“That’s right,” said Jeffers, the two words so drawn out in his accent that Savich wanted to say them for him, that or just pull them out of his mouth. “How do we get her, Agent Savich? I sure want to hear what she has to say about the Ghouls.”

Savich said, “You heard Marilyn say that Tammy went to the Caribbean, to an island ‘right’ for her. She couldn’t have walked there, and she sure can’t be hard to spot. Just a moment, let me call Jimmy Maitland. They can get on that right away.” He placed the phone call, listened, and when he finally hung up, he said, “Mr. Maitland was nearly whistling. He’s sure they’ll get her now. What else do you guys think from listening to her?”

“Well,” Jane said as she sat down, crossing her legs and leaning forward, “it seems to be some sort of induced hallucination. Marilyn seems to think they’re real, and both you and the boys saw something unusual in that barn, isn’t that right, Agent Savich?”

“Yes,” Savich said.

“Maybe Tommy and Tammy have some sort of ability to alter what you see and feel, some sort of hypnotic ability.”

Savich said to Jeffers, “You did a profile on Timmy Tuttle before he turned out to be Tammy.”

“Savich is right, Jane,” Jeffers said. “We ain’t got nothing useful that fits a psychotic cross-dresser who may have hypnotic skills.”

Savich laughed, said, “You know what I want to try? I want to talk Marilyn into letting us hypnotize her. Maybe if you’re right about this, she can tell us a lot more when she’s under.”

Jeffers laughed. “Hey, maybe the Ghouls are real, maybe they’re entities, aliens from outer space. What do you think, Jane?”

“I like the sound of that, Jeffers. It’d perk up our boring lives a bit, add some color to our humdrum files. White cones whirling around black circles-maybe they’re from Mars, you think?”

Savich said, “Actually, I’ve been reading articles, studies on various phenomena involved in past crimes.”

“Found anything?” Jeffers asked.

“Nothing like this,” Savich said. “Not a thing like this.” He added as he stood, “Joke all you want, but just don’t do it in front of the media.”

“Not a chance,” Jane said. “I don’t want to get committed.” She rose, shook Savich’s hand. “Marilyn told you that Tammy met up with the Ghouls in a cave. My husband is really into speleology and we usually go spelunking on our vacations. In fact, we were planning on visiting some of the caves in the Ozarks this summer. No matter how much I can laugh about this, I might want to rethink that plan.”

Washington, D.C.

Lily was leaning over her drawing table, looking at her work. No Wrinkles Remus was emerging clear and strong and outrageous from the tip of her beloved sable brush. The brush was getting a bit gnarly, but it was good for another few weeks, maybe.

First panel: Remus is sitting at his desk, a huge, impressive affair, looking smug as he says to someone who looks like Sam Donaldson, “Here’s a photo of you without your wig. You’re really bald, Sam. I’m going to show this photo to the world if you don’t give me what I want.”

Second panel: Sam Donaldson clearly isn’t happy. He grabs the photo, says, “I’m not bald, Remus, and I don’t wear a wig. This photo is a fake. You can’t blackmail me.”

Third panel: Remus is gloating. “Why don’t you call Jessie Ventura? Just ask him what I did to him.”

Fourth panel: Sam Donaldson, angry, defeated, says, “What do you want?”

Fifth panel: Remus says, “I want Cokie Roberts. You’re going to fix it so I can have dinner with her. I want her and I’m going to have her.”

Lily was grinning when she turned to see Simon Russo standing in the doorway.

He looked fit, healthy, and tanned. She felt suddenly puny and weak, still bowed over a bit. She wished he’d just go away, but she said, “Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you, but you should be in bed. I just spoke to Savich, and he said to check on you. He knew you wouldn’t be following orders. You’ve got a strip nearly ready?”

“Yep. It’s not the final version yet, but close. Remus is in fine form. He’s blackmailing Sam Donaldson.”

Simon wandered over to look down at the panels. He laughed. “I’ve missed Remus, the amoral bastard. Glad to see him back.”

“Now I’ve got to see if the Washington Post would like to take me and Remus in. Keep your fingers crossed that they’ll agree. I won’t get rich anytime soon, but it’s a start.”

Simon said after a moment, looking down at the Remus strip, “I know a cartoonist doesn’t make much money until he or she is syndicated. Hey, I just happen to know Rick Bowes. He runs the desk. How about I give him a call, go to lunch, show him the strips?”

Lily didn’t like it, obvious enough, so he didn’t say anything more until she shook her head. “All right, then, you bring some of these strips to show him and I’ll take you both to a Mexican restaurant.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe that would be okay.”

“Will you take a nap now, Lily? You should take some of your meds, too.”

Sean hollered from the nursery down the hall. They heard Gabriella telling him that if he’d just stop chewing his knuckles as well as hers, she’d get him a graham cracker and they’d go for a walk in the park. Sean let out one more yell, then burbled. Gabriella laughed. “Let’s go get that cracker, champ.”

Lily heard Sean cooing as Gabriella carried him down the hall. She tried to swallow the tears, but it just wasn’t possible. She stood there, not making a sound, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Simon knew about tragedy, knew about the soul-deep pain that dulled over time but never went away. He didn’t say a word, just very slowly pulled her against him and pressed her face to his shoulder.

When the phone rang a minute later, Lily pulled away, wouldn’t look him straight in the eye, and answered it.

She handed it to him. “It’s for you.”