Hell (36 page)

‘Stop it.' Sam reached for her hand, held it tight. ‘Don't do this to yourself, Gracie.'

‘How can I not?'

‘You have to try. There's no real logic in it, anyway. If this is down to Cooper – and it's another big if – he hates our whole family.'

‘He hates the two of us more than Claudia.'

Sam's mouth twisted. ‘Me most of all. He's said it often enough.' He paused. ‘That doesn't make me responsible for what happened to Dan, any more than it does you.'

‘Have they questioned Cooper about it?'

‘Not yet,' Sam said. ‘But they will.'

They wouldn't let him near the scumbag, though, were right not to.

‘Will we tell Claudia?' Grace asked.

‘I don't think so,' Sam said. ‘Not till we know something for sure.'

‘If we ever do,' Grace said.

FIFTY-SEVEN

September 22

‘
I
feel rage all the time,' Sam told Martinez the following Wednesday.

Taking a walk in Lummus Park at lunchtime.

‘So talk about it, man,' Martinez said. ‘Let it out.'

Sam glanced toward the bench a few yards away that had once been home to Mildred, and he was glad of the anonymity out here among the vacationers and locals, strolling with their children and dogs, clutching their bottles of water and sun cream.

‘Nothing much to let out,' he said, ‘except there's too much darkness in
here
right now.' He touched two fingers to his head. ‘I can't seem to see any way to stop the rot, you know?'

‘You're just depressed, man,' Martinez said. ‘It'll get easier.'

‘I need to believe that,' Sam said. ‘My wife and son need me to.'

‘I read something one time,' Martinez went on. ‘“One good feeling begets another.” Something like that.'

Sam grinned. ‘Begets?'

‘You can mock,' Martinez said. ‘But it's true. Out of nowhere, you'll get a good feeling, and—'

‘You're not going to sing, are you?' Sam said.

They walked on.

‘So what are you thinking now about Jones?' Martinez asked after a few moments. ‘Paid by Cooper or just a whacko?'

The post-mortem had confirmed that the man's liver had been pretty much pickled, his brain showing enough damage to have made him a solitary crazy.

Though that did not, of course, preclude the possibility of Cooper having been paying him to keep watch on Claudia's house, and maybe he'd found a way, even from jail, to go on putting enough in Jones's pockets for a hit on the family he loathed.

Or maybe not.

‘I don't know,' Sam said. ‘Seems to me there are no limits these days to what I don't know.'

They went on walking.

‘Only one good thing,' he said.

‘Yeah?' Martinez said.

‘Either way, Cooper's still going to death row.'

The case against the killer was building well despite his continuing refusal to talk.

They still didn't know how he and Bianchi had met, or exactly what their relationship had been, but Richard Bianchi's apartment on NW North River Drive had at last yielded a missing link.

Minute fragments of Jerome Cooper's skin wedged beneath the baseboard in Bianchi's small, steam-cleaned bathroom.

Cooper's hidey-hole on shore, it now seemed likely.

The place, they were guessing, where the murderer might have gone to punish himself after he'd killed and mutilated his victims, raking at his own body till it bled, the way his late unlamented mom had taught him.

All the remaining evidence needed to take the ‘writer's' memory down into infamy alongside Cal the Hater. And if Bianchi had lived, his defense would have challenged on the basis that with so much time having passed, and the apartment not having been sealed, the skin fragments might have been planted.

Still, proven in court or not, a little more satisfaction, from Sam's point of view, for Grace's sake.

Nothing much else feeling satisfying to him now, Lord knew.

His sorrow for Claudia and her sons knew no bounds.

And they still had no absolute proof that Cooper had had anything to do with Matthew Harris Jones before he'd stuck that knife into Dan's heart and destroyed a happy family of good people.

Just another crazy seemed the prevailing opinion, as the days passed.

Sam was not, would never be, sure of that.

Only one thing he did feel sure of.

He wanted Jerome Cooper out of this world.

He didn't give a damn which way.

Lynching, plague, electric chair or lethal injection.

The sooner the better.

FIFTY-EIGHT

October 1

G
race wanted him dead.

She wanted it so badly that it was making her sick.

Shaking her core beliefs.

A taste for death.

That was what Cooper had done to her.

She blamed him now for everything, for Bianchi's death too, even more than she blamed herself.

Which was, she supposed, a kind of progress.

She had not yet shared those feelings with Magda, had cut back on their sessions, too preoccupied for now with trying to find ways to help Claudia and her nephews, doing what little she could, what little she was allowed to do.

The funeral had passed, and Sam had agreed with her soon after that they needed to tell Claudia about the unproven suspicion of a link between Dan's killer and Cooper.

‘Do you think I hadn't already considered that?' Claudia had said.

‘Why didn't you say so?' Grace asked her.

‘What difference would it have made?' Claudia said.

‘You should start seeing patients again,' Magda had told Grace yesterday. ‘Maybe at my place, if you're not sure about working from home.'

Location seemed the least of Grace's uncertainties.

Dan's death had reignited all her own fears of losing Sam.

She knew it was a natural enough reaction: turning such tragedies on to oneself, playing self-torturing ‘what if?' games. But her mind, it seemed to her, was still too jammed with other things for her to be ready to help troubled children.

Her sister's and those young men's agony. Her own loss, too, of the brother-in-law who had become such a staunch friend.

Her still-abiding guilt over her own crime.

And, paradoxically darkest of all, it seemed to her, her longing for the moment of Cooper's death.

FIFTY-NINE

December 11

J
ewel had come to him the night he'd started doing it again.

Really
doing it.

‘Lie down,' she'd told him, the way she used to.

‘I don't have to,' he'd told her.

‘Lie down, dolthead,' she said.

‘I don't have to do what you tell me anymore,' he said.

Because you're dead.

‘Lie down and take it like the shit-for-brains you are,' she said.

That was how he knew it was really Jewel.

Just a couple of the names she used to lavish on him.

Along with the pain.

He had known then that there was no escaping her. Ever.

So he had done it.

Over time in this place, they'd tried stopping him.

They took away the hard brush he'd stolen from the cleaning store, the peeler he'd smuggled out of the kitchen, the scourer from the shower block.

He used his fingernails, so they cut and filed them down.

But they grew again.

There was always a way.

So Jewel had kept on coming, and he had kept on doing it.

He had known he was getting sick a long while before they'd noticed.

‘Do it
again
,' Jewel kept telling him.

All the way from hell.

Except in the old days, when he'd
disciplined
himself, he'd poured bleach on his wounds, the way she'd taught him, and Lord God, it had hurt, but it had kept him clean, the way he liked.

So now he was real sick.

His blood was poisoned.

They'd taken him to the ninth floor, which he knew was the psych ward, and they'd chained him to a bed, stuck tubes in him and given him medicine, and some of them were decent to him, considering who he was.

All of them better than his own mother had ever been.

None of them as kind as Blossom.

He was glad she was dead, glad she'd never really known him.

Maybe they'd cure him, given time.

Though if they did, he'd just do it all over again.

It was what Jewel wanted.

To be with him again.

Really with him.

Coming closer.

SIXTY

December 24

‘
C
ooper says he wants to see you.'

Martinez brought him the news.

‘He's dying, and he's talking last wishes, and he wants to see you. I didn't want to tell you, but Alvarez said we have to pass it on, though the Lieutenant agrees with me, thinks you should just tell him to go fuck himself.'

‘I'll go,' Sam said.

‘Why the hell would you do that?' Martinez said.

‘Maybe it's like they say,' Sam said. ‘Closure.'

He might scarcely have recognized him but for the rows of old scars and fresher wounds visible on his chest.

Sepsis, a doctor had told Sam. Organs failing.

His own insanity killing him.

He was afraid of death, Sam knew, remembering the
Epistles
.

Afraid of hell.

‘You came,' he said. ‘I knew you would.'

‘What do you want, Cooper?' Sam asked.

‘Won't you sit down?' the dying man asked.

‘I'll stand,' Sam said.

‘How's Grace doing?'

‘Mention my wife again,' Sam said, ‘and I'm out of here.'

He said it coldly, flatly, was surprised by the absence of rage in him.

Pain gripped the man in the bed, made him shudder.

Sam felt no pity.

‘I'm a little scared,' Cooper said.

‘Can't say I'm surprised,' Sam said. ‘With so much on your conscience.'

‘She made me do this, you know,' Cooper said. ‘My mother.'

‘Your mother is dead,' Sam said. ‘You killed her.'

‘I killed a lot of people,' Cooper said. ‘I think she was the only one who deserved it, though.'

‘What do you want?' Sam asked again.

Cooper's lips were cracked, his skin yellowing, little oxygen tubes in his nostrils, fluids flowing into and out of him via other tubes.

‘I was sorry to hear about Claudia's husband,' he said.

The rage came back.

Sam clenched his fists and took a step closer to the bed.

‘Something you want to tell me about that?' he said. ‘To confess?'

‘That had nothing to do with me,' Cooper said.

Sam looked right into the dying man's eyes.

The evil still there.

‘It was all Jewel, like I said.'

Sam stepped back again, away from the stink of the man.

‘Last time,' he said. ‘What do you want?'

‘To talk to you,' Cooper said. ‘Like always.'

‘No,' Sam said. ‘No more talk.'

‘Come on,' the dying man said. ‘Don't you want to know what I put in the hypodermic I stuck you with?'

‘Are you planning to tell me?' Sam said.

Cooper took a long, shaky breath.

‘I'm not sure if I recall,' he said.

Sam shook his head, started to turn.

‘Don't I get a last wish?' Cooper said.

‘You get nothing,' Sam said. ‘But I do have one wish for you.'

‘And what's that, Samuel Lincoln Becket?'

‘That you get yourself to hell,' Sam said. ‘The sooner the better.'

And he turned and began to walk away.

‘You haven't told me how the family's doing,' Cooper said.

Sam went on walking.

‘You can't just walk out,' Cooper said. ‘I might have things left to tell you.'

Sam went on, heading for the doors.

‘Don't you
dare
walk out on me, you black sonofabitch.'

Sam stopped and turned around.

Just long enough to smile.

‘So you just walked the fuck out,' Martinez said outside in the Chevy.

‘Uh-huh,' Sam said.

‘Good feeling?'

‘Matter of fact,' Sam said, ‘it was.'

‘More to come, man,' Martinez said. ‘Like I told you.'

SIXTY-ONE

December 25

T
he call came just after seven fifteen next morning.

They were still in bed.

In another year, they supposed Joshua would be getting them up before dawn on Christmas Day, but as it was, Grace – with hours of cooking ahead of her – was still burrowed against Sam's back.

He groaned, picked up the phone.

Praying it was nothing bad.

Nothing to take him away from home.

‘Becket,' he said.

And listened.

‘Thanks for calling,' he said.

Put the phone back down.

‘What?' Grace murmured.

‘Cooper died,' Sam said.

And there it was.

Another good feeling, just the way Martinez had predicted.

‘Thank God,' Grace said.

‘Amen,' Sam said.