Kirk watched the evening news.  The name kept hitting like a slap in the face.  Her name had been circulated for a month, along with her picture, a little doll baby like anybody's grandchild, anyone's daughter.  Pretty child.  The papers were full of the details.  He had kept the bastards out as long as possible, but they got their pictures and lurid descriptions.  Norman had a granddaughter; kids of his own, as did most of the men under him. 
     He listed what he knew, drawing little thumbnail sketches as he went. 
     Footprints and evidence ruined.  First man on the scene (asshole) totally incompetent. (Was that so?)  Why ask that?  What's there?  Kid had been hanging for days.  Decomposition and forensic standards had it at almost a week.   Nobody up at the house noticed or didn't want to.  Check the house.  Get inside. 
     She was hung high.  Her toes, eye level.  Kids had to reach up to touch them.  Eye level  above average height.  For whom?  For what?  So he could work?
     So he could...
     Big.
     Big Mother Fucker.
     Big...man.
     Tracker from the Boy Scouts couldn't lock down the print or the knot with which she was tied; guy was tickled to death, finding something new.  New...  Something new.  They laugh in the operating room.  The Brits can't see an auto accident without cracking a joke. 
     Hypnosis.
     Mass hallucination.  Thirty men--good men. 
     Sherry Gardner...twelve years old.  Sherry Gardner.     Birthday...the day she disappeared was her birthday.  Senior officer has to notify the parents.  Not a nice job.  I hate that part. 
     Family lived in Trenton. 
     Mass hallucination.

    Looking down from her hill, Marta De Falvo watched the fat little man.  He had come again.  He was breathing hard and his short, grey hair appeared in the crack between the window shade and the doorframe.  Each time he made the trip up the path, she reached for the door.  She wanted to open it and say, 'Come in.  I understand.  Let me help.' 
     But she couldn't make her hand reach that far.
     She knew what he wanted.  She knew more than he did himself.  The little flashing globe on his dashboard told her everything.  His was not the first tormented mind to seek answers from the Casa De Falvo.

    Somebody was home.  His instincts about doors were always right.  Cops and closed doors had a relationship that was ageless.  They were either in there, or they weren't.  He stood to the right.  If they shot through, the wall would protect him.  If they opened the door, he was closer to the knob, closer to them.   Old stuff, rookie stuff. 
     No warrant.
     He reached for the doorknob.  It had been painted seven or eight times and was chipped down to the metal.  It turned slightly and the door swung open.  Now he was breaking in.  He knew that anything he saw or heard could be thrown out in court, but there were rules and then there were rules.  They said an old lady lived here alone.  She could be dead, or she might have fallen.
     "Hello," he said, into the open door.  "Hello, Ma'am, if I'm intruding, just let me know.  I'm with the State Police.  The door was open and I--"
      Her voice was like withered, dry newspaper.  A strong scent of vinegar wafted through the kitchen.  There were no lights on and the shades were down.  He wondered how someone could cook in the dark.  The .38 under his arm felt 10 ounces heavier.  It always did, just before he pulled it, or had to.   He couldn't see beyond the open door.  But she had said something.
     "I'm Detective Kirk...State Police."
     She was stirring a large kettle, not facing him, acting as if this were nothing, an everyday occurrence.  Her faded paisley dress was a writhing target in the dimly lit room.  Kirk controlled himself.  She turned finally.  Her deeply lined face was hideous in the shadows.  Diamond blue eyes took him in and he thought they were as brilliant as stained glass windows in a darkened church. 
     "I just need to ask you a few questions."  He pulled the photos, stepped further into the room.   They were arranged in an order that would take the viewer gently down the path.  First, hinting at the crime, shown to get a response, then, if they didn't want to go along, the harder pictures.  The last few were 4"x4" squares of horror.
     "No'h...no'h," she said, with a hand to her chest.   The first one was just the foot.  It was in bad shape, but revealed only the first few inches. 
    "No?  No, what?," Kirk said, not understanding.
    "No'h is a knot," she said, "used for tying sheep."
     "This knot in the picture is used to tie sheep?"
     "Yes," Marta De Falvo answered.  "It is very fast.  The animal suffers."
     "Mrs. De Falvo, can you tell me anything about this?"
     She looked at the pictures and started to cry.  He kept the bad ones in his other hand, face down.  She was immediately implicated, having knowledge of the crime. 
     "It is called laice-de-juier, a knot used to tie an animal before the slaughter," she said. 
     "And this," Kirk said.  He wasn't getting impatient.  Fanning out the last of the color pictures, he plucked a close-up from the group.  She held her head with bony fingers, eyes tightly closed.  He could feel the shock pass between them. 
     A deep pleading cry came from the old woman.  "Please stop."
    "I'll tell you what's going to stop.  The guy who did this is going to stop."
     "I can't look," she said, still pleading.
     "Mrs. De Falvo, can you help me find this guy.?"  He held her shoulder gently like an undertaker.  It was going to get a lot tougher.  Things had happened here and she wasn't telling everything.  Kirk was on the job alone and that was always a problem but she might just get very cooperative if he pushed a little harder. 
      He thought about and it could wait.

      He heard a car.  Tires crunching on gravel.  A door closed.  Marta De Falvo's eyes did a color change.  There was an odd, pre-recorded quality to what he was hearing.  It was subtle; a normal ear would miss it.  Then he heard a woman's voice.  He was jolted by it.  Involuntarily, he took a step back, as though the old woman before him had produced a knife.  Norman Kirk was not much taller, but she seemed to tower over him.  The room moved.  Walls and floor shifted.  He felt like he was at sea.
     "That's my wife," he said.
     "Don't look," Marta De Falvo ordered.  She gripped his hand, pinching nerves. 
     "But that's my wife down there."
 Again he heard Marian's sweet voice call out from a place where she shouldn't--couldn't possibly be.  The chain of events required to have her actually be there was unthinkable. 
     But there she was.
     The wrongness of it came through the door, the windows.  It nagged, drew him, just the same.  The shades were down, amber light glowing through the parchment.  In that golden kitchen with vinegar and onions simmering in the pot, Norman Kirk began to twist.  The feeling took him straight from the spine.  It was a reeling, dizzy, compulsion.  It was an urge to turn around; to check behind, over your shoulder, and never stop. 
     "Don't touch the window," she shouted.  "You must not!"
 Kirk reached toward the knitted ring that hung from the shade.  He looked at her and put his right forefinger through it, lightly tugging on the string.  The shade went up an inch and the catch stopped it.  The old woman gasped.  He saw movement, like some deep-sea creature full of kelp, black and swarming, past the window. 
     "Why?"
 She backed away, into a corner. 
 "What if I just walk out the door, huh?  What if that is my wife out there?"
 On the second floor, the room directly above, a window slammed shut.  Marta De Falvo began to scream, shaking violently.  She was going into convulsions, hands flipping uncontrollably as though she had burned herself.  She sank to the floor, her head tucked under her dress and pointed to the stairway.  A scraping noise came from the ceiling, like branches dragged across a forest floor. 
     "This is the State Police!" Kirk yelled.  He threw his weight against the heavy oak door.  Paint chips and dust flew in a brown cloud.  He stood panting, cheek pressed into the molding.  There was no time to realize that he was terrified of something he hadn't yet seen.  He couldn't understand the old woman's reaction.  The door flew open with the force of a head-on collision.  He was thrown and mashed into the opposite wall.  A cast iron foot on the stove brought him to a halt and Kirk thought his back was broken.  The gun came out with a mind of its own.  Both hands grabbed the blue weapon, fired and fired again.  There was nothing to see, nothing to hit.  The stairway door, leading to the second floor was black as a drain with no visible target. 
     "State Police," he whispered.  There it was.  Through the room, over the wheezing old woman and his own labored breathing, came the wailing and screaming of a hundred dogfights.  It was a whirlpool of sound; potent and terrible.  It rose until it was unbearable.  Then it became the voices of weeping women and children.   It was like a vicious animal had come through leaving people broken and dead.
     Kirk himself began to scream.  Like riding on a roller coaster, thinking that you won't do it and then there you are, screaming.  It was childish and remote, a crumbling of his strength, a disintegration of his inner self.  Something approached him.  It smelled of rotten flesh and tomb walls, dancing in his vision like organisms under a lens.  Squirming and heaving, it fell toward him, insanity rising in his mind in an alarming hive of thoughts.  It came close, insect wings beating, tiny white hooks setting themselves into his clothing, his skin.  Mother's milk and blood, raw slimy fat, it wrapped around him.  He knew that his gun hand, his right hand, had been snapped off at the wrist.  This seemed a small consequence.  The grip was like steel, the apparition now moving back, its mass, its sheer weight, suffocating.    Kirk's eyes were closed tight.   They opened even minutely, and wave of nausea swept through him that was paralyzing.  He tried to stand.  As the floor rushed up once more, his last thought was clear.  It was a fervent hope that his wife's voice not be among those tortured screaming people.
 
 

As he sped along the blacktop of Route 611, Frank Holtz fingered the stock of the shotgun.  He kept his fingers off the barrel, which would leave rusty prints.  He thought about the photos on the seat beside him.  The barn was dark, so the photographers had used flash attachments.  It gave the scene an eerie glow, reminiscent of things he used to see in vice work; things he had quit vice to get away from.   The outlines were clear and the close-ups were awful.  Good quality--awful truth.  He had seen some nasty things but this was beyond war and political conflicts.  Most public libraries had books on serial killers.   Psychopaths and sexual predators usually did a neat job.  What he saw in this case was sloppy, disjointed, as though the kid had gone through a chipper.   This guy was the worst they had ever seen.  It had to be some totally retarded, totally wacked out mook, more animal than human. 
     Very disturbed individual. 
     That had been said of Charlie Starkweather.  In the early days of crime detection, shit, Frank thought to himself, only ten years ago, they used terms that were so proper, nice, even cute.   Cops wanted to be shrinks; get into the killer's head.  Holtz didn't want to be anywhere near this guy's head.  Unless it was to ventilate it.  Gemini had left them cut and dissected.  So did Jack for that matter.  The material not available to the general public could be viewed by officers.  Frank had seen some nasty things. 
     None of them like you.
     Kirk had not called in for more than two hours.  Goddamned dinosaur.  Working alone in the era of Miranda was just stupid.  Did you read him his rights?  Sure, just ask him.  Stupid.  Someone had to check it out.  He passed the barn, yellow tape still marking the territory of--what?  Crime scene.  His scene.
     Pulling up in front of the house, he saw Kirk's car.  The radio was on and he could hear the call numbers still being repeated.  The well-worn hand mike felt sticky in his hand.  He called the dispatch and told them what he had.  Something was wrong.  But he wanted to cover for the old man, so he didn't say it.  The shades were all down tight and the door was ajar.  Night was coming fast and the house was dark.  He walked up the flagstones to the porch.  As he did this, he looked down into the valley at the barn roof.  He could see the paper on the door.  State seal, ordering people to keep away.   They should have left a man down there.
      Holtz was a vet.  His time in Vietnam had taught him the meaning of quiet.  He looked instinctively for places in the boards where they might squeak, high spots along the path to the door, the rusted spring inside, all posed problems.  His awareness was keen.  The environment had once been leaves and underbrush filled with snakes and invisible steel wires that might take a careless grunt's leg to heaven.  Frank's legs were still in this world.  Ambush always smelled the same; it was greasy and close, the cordite already filling the air. 
     A sudden breeze ruffled his blonde hair.  It tugged at his pant leg.   His stomach muscles knotted and he pushed a fist to his belt buckle. 
    "Only the wind," he mouthed the words.
 Beginning to wish he had brought the riot gun, he reached into his jacket.  There was nothing going on here.  It was just the kind of thing that the old man would jump all over him for.  No way was he going to look like a rookie.  No sense in showing a weapon until there was a reason. 
     There was no noise, Godammnit, that was reason enough.  It was easier to be a soldier, that was for sure.   Survival training taught him that no noise meant trouble.  But back in the world, nothing meant anything.  At that point, just in front of the door, there wasn't any sound at all.  Holtz could feel the drop in movement and the absence of birds.  It was like a heavy weight, just before a tornado.
     No reason to show a weapon.  He just forgot to call in.  Getting old.  Not thinking.  Dead....
     He drew the gun anyway.  The .44 Desert Eagle could blow through an armored truck.  Using the barrel to push the door open, he stepped inside.  There was nothing moving.  The kitchen was dark, nothing to see.  Just a stove, table, sink, cabinets.  He stepped to the middle of the floor and turned slowly around.  Placing his hand on the stove, he found it still warm. 
     Holtz pulled down on one of the shades.  It rolled up with a snap and flapped five or six times.  The weak light was welcome, outlining everything in the room. 
     "Anybody here?"
 His voice sounded small and hollow.  He went back to the window and looked out, trying not to turn his back on the dark for long.  The two police radios barked numbers and static.  In the far corner of the room a closet was obscured by shadow.  The door was open a few inches.  Everything in Frank's world began to move in slow motion.  Like single snap shots, the ten feet between him and the closet flowed past.  There was a click behind the door.  The single tiny noise was out of proportion and sounded much louder than it was.  Holtz flinched as though something had come at his face.  He squeezed the trigger on his Desert Eagle, almost firing.  There was no doubt he was afraid of the gun.  When it went off, everybody at the range stepped back to look.  It was the choice of bodyguards and Mafia guys.   Then he thought about writing the report for shooting at nothing.  The deeper blackness of the closet caused a strange crawling sensation down his shoulders and neck. 
     As a child, he had been terrified to look out a window at night.  To even glance at the dark reflective rectangles of glass would paralyze him with fear.  Cousins and aunts had tried to help him overcome his phobia, but failed.  He felt that way now.  He moved closer.  Inching forward, he didn't want to look inside.  But he couldn't resist.  The law said he had to open that door.  He thought back to a fishing trip. When it got dark, the bucket of shrimp had looked like one of those windows.  It's water like a black jewel with monsters inside, Frank had to ask one of the kids to pull out a shrimp.  He began to really regret not bringing the flashlight.  With the middle finger of his left hand, he pulled at the doorknob.  A faint odor of sweat and something like cologne fell from inside.  He pushed the door open wide.  Luminosity hung there.  It was a shape large at the bottom and tapered to a tubular top.  It was a body. 

    This was just like the other one. 
     "Get me down son," a voice said, near the floor. 
    Holtz jumped back like a man who has stepped on a snake.  His ankle turned painfully as he crouched, aiming the gun into the closet.  He held his breath. 
     "Please Ace, cut me down.  I don't feel well."
     "Kirk!"
     "Oh please," Norman Kirk said.
     "Hold on!  I have a penknife."
     "Norman--call me Norman."
     Holtz felt for the rope.  His hand went up Kirk's leg until he found it.  The old man's arms reached out and wrapped around Holtz's legs.  There was a dull thud as his head hit the wooden floor.  He rolled out of the closet.  Holtz helped him to sit upright against the wall. 
     "What happened?"
     "Help me up" Norman Kirk said, reaching for a hand.
     "Yeah, Jesus Norm, let's get the hell out of here. Let's get some other people here.  This place is scaring the shit out of me."  He slipped his gun back into the holster and pulled Kirk to his feet. 
     "Broke my wrist."
     "We'll get you to a hospital and you'll be okay.  Don't worry about--"
 The swipe was so fast that he hardly felt it.   Just a subtle jolt across his back.   Holtz sank to his knees.  When the pain dropped from his brain, he couldn't understand the intensity.  His back had burst open, on fire.  His jacket was ripped to shreds as well as his flesh.  He got the gun out again and meant business.  He was pissed.  Spinning around, he tried to see who had raked him and with what.  Somewhere in the dark house a panther screamed.  Then, as the blood ran into his pants, the cat's breath was next to his ear.   The gun was butting into the back of his hand, jerking right up to his shoulder, but he couldn't hear it.   He felt a hand on his own. 
     "Cease fire," he heard the old man say. 
     Holtz closed his eyes and passed out. 
     With great effort, Norman Kirk raised himself up and walked to the kitchen.  His leg, where the rope had been tied, was totally dead and felt like a stump up past his thigh.  His right arm was useless and his head throbbed like a festering wound.  The wallpaper, the floor, the windows, the uncanny sense of smell; there was something very different about his perception.  Every meal that had been cooked in that house, he could identify.  He knew that there had not been children there for a long time.  Then he knew he was wrong about that.   There had been one. 
     Once out the door, he shuffled toward the car.  He was light-headed, with pains shooting through his chest.  Just a few more feet.  Every step was exhausting.  The night was coming down around him.  He got to the car, unlocked it, and took the mike in his hand.  With a sigh, he pushed the send button, and lay down on the seat. 
     "Officer down," he said, and fell asleep.
 
 

Frostbite. 
    Days later, it was still with him.  The only thing that compared to that memory was deep cold.  It was like a chill that went into his marrow and kept him afraid.   He remembered an old drunk who had slid down the river bank in below zero weather and laid all night in the water.  Doctors had to cut off all his fingers and toes.  Though he was safe in his bed, he felt like that.   It was in his fingers and toes, in his heart, his pounding wrist, and in his will to go on. 
 Crooks and killers were always out there.  There was an endless supply.   Any confrontation could cause an emotional unbalance, but he couldn't shake this fear.  This thing--as he had eventually begun to call it--had come close.  It had hurt him bad and nearly killed one of his men.  Holtz had suffered kidney damage.  The cuts were so deep that he needed more than five hundred stitches inside and out.  He would be in the hospital for months, scarred for life. 
     The relentless throbbing only made him angry.  He kept looking at the cast as though it would go away.   As he went over the sequence of events, his logical mind went back and forth between saying him and it.  What got to him most was clearly an underlying sense of humor.  Whatever had beaten them up was playing a game.  Stringing up kids and cops was bad stuff, a losing game. 
     You'll lose.
     Who said that?

     He couldn't remember.  Moments before Holtz had been attacked, there had been something there.  But even before that, there had been a problem.  The woman was saying things.  He had even asked his wife if she was there.  Of course, she wasn't.  But it had been so real. 
    Like meat and teeth and bloody bearskin rugs.
    It was psychological.  All the data played out like a puzzle, a series of pictographs.  It had to be hypnosis.  There was a guy in Bethlehem who could put you under.  But Norman felt silly asking to be put under to check what happened like some UFO nut. 
     Heaving gulch of dead breath, endless throat, needles, pins, sickles, eyes so smart.
     It was a trick.  Dogs and weeping children, guns going off; it was all impressive.  But that's all it was.  It had done in two armed cops. 
     And he couldn't remember.

    Marta De Falvo was taken to the state hospital in Trenton.  She had been evasive at best.  Officers had searched the rooms of her house and found her in the corner of an upstairs hall.  She had been dragged there and left in a quivering fetal ball.  The woman was completely bughouse, an officer commented. 
     Kirk paid her a visit in the psychiatric ward.  The glass doors and white walls always reminded him of painful and uncomfortable memories.  It gave him no comfort that it wasn't that kind of hospital.  There were framed pictures on the tile walls.  Pictures in watercolor and crayon; scenes of animals spiraling in a cornucopia; of gloomy forests, of strange, oddly shaped heads, elongated bodies, badly painted, childish, primitively rendered, marks of madness. 
 Mrs. De Falvo couldn't receive visitors.  Kirk would usually pull his badge without hesitation, but for a reason he couldn't clearly see, he decided not to show it.  For now, he wanted to be an uncle, a friend of the family.  This was not the time to be candid.  He said good-by to the nurses and ducked into an empty closet.  Using some simple slight of hand, he had gotten her room number and a copy of the chart.  She was being restrained.  She was considered dangerous.  Such a tiny woman.  Violent behavior.  When doctors approached she tried to bite and scratch and she had attacked the nurses. 
     In her room, he found this to be true.  Everything was padded with foam and wrapped with duct tape.  The curtains were drawn and again the two were looking at each other in shadows.  She was in a light nylon straight jacket, which was tied to the bed rails.  A strong smell of urine and day-old excrement filled the air.  There were several nasty scratches on her face, obviously, self-inflicted. 
     "Hi there," Kirk said. 
     Marta De Falvo began to clear her throat.  It went on for almost a minute.  A bank of instruments and computer screens cast a green glow across the bed sheets and the struggling woman.  Each time someone passed outside in the hall, Norman felt a nervous pang.  But he was allowed to be there.  In that respect he was far above the law. 
     "Can you understand me?"  He bent over the bed, getting closer to her eyes.
 She began to relax.  Recognition sifted into her mind.  Lying back, the restraint sagged and her shriveled body went limp like a pile of sticks. 
     "Y-you want to--"
     "I want to..."
     "You want to know why...you are not dead."
     He hadn't wanted to know that at all.  But now that she said it, the question immediately became a priority. 
     "Why would I be dead?"
     "That is what he does."
     "Who?  Who did it?  I want to know who you're talking about!"
     "Hey, you can't be in here!"  The intruding nurse grabbed the intercom, pressing a red button.  "No visitors, no family, no--"
     "It's okay, I'm with the police."
     "I'm sorry Detective...Kirk," she said, reading the card, "this woman really is  in danger of heart failure and other things.  You'll have to leave."
     "Yes, of course," Kirk replied.  "Here's my card.  I need to talk to her as soon as possible."
     On the bed, the frail body strained almost to the point of breaking bones.  Her teeth were clenched, spreading a hideous grimace across her face.  Kirk thought that she might be afflicted with Alzheimer's or maybe she was just in a strange country who's people had her tied to the bed.  A string of drool dropped from the corner of her mouth, glistening for a moment on the cloth of her gown.  Her right hand fingers made a pinching gesture.  They were like pale lobster claws.  He realized that she was reaching for him to the extent that the wrist straps allowed.  Lowering himself to one knee he took her hand and it went limp. 
     "Really," the nurse said, "this could kill her."
     "No, she's calm now," Kirk answered.  "Look, she's relaxing."
     Marta De Falvo's face took on an expression of deep sadness.  Her deep blue eyes filled with tears and she squeezed Kirk's hand again, pinching.  After a long slow exhalation, she began to speak, one word slowly after another.
     "The Lo--bee--zo--men," she sounded out the syllables.  "Lo...be...zo...men," she said again.
     "Yes ma'am," Kirk said, his ear close to her mouth.  "Is that the man's name?"
     "The name..."
     He looked to the nurse.  "Is she sedated?"
     "We gave her something.  She hasn't slept well since she got here."
     "You are dead," the old woman muttered and sank into a drugged sleep. 
     Kirk watched and said, "She's sleeping now."  He said it more to himself. 
     Two days later Marta De Falvo died.