came the clink of china, then the rattle of spoons as Sasha searched
through the flatware in a drawer.
Lilly said, “The cops weren’t cops, either. Looked like cops.
Uniforms.
Badges. Guns. Men I’ve known all my life. Manuel. He looks like Manuel.
Doesn’t act like Manuel anymore.”
“What was different? ”
“They asked a few questions. Scribbled some notes. Made a plaster
impression of the footprint. Outside Jimmy’s window. Dusted for
fingerprints, but not everywhere they should have.
It wasn’t real.
Wasn’t thorough at all. They didn’t even find the crow.”
“Crow? ”
“They didn’t … care somehow, ” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard
my question, was struggling to understand their indifference.
“Lou, my father-in-law, used to be a cop. He was thorough. And he cared.
What’s he have to do with this, anyway? He was a good cop. A kind man.
You always knew he cared. Not like … them.” I turned to Sasha for some
illumination about the crow and Louis Wing.
She nodded, which I took to mean that she understood and would clue me
in later if Lilly, in her distress, didn’t make the connections for me.
Playing devil’s advocate, I said to Lilly, “The police have to be
detached, impersonal, to do their job right.”
“It wasn’t that.
They’ll look for Jimmy. They’ll investigate.
They’ll try. I think they will. But they were also … managing me.”
“Managing? ”
“They said not to talk. Not to anyone. For twenty-four hours.
Talking jeopardizes the investigation. Child abductions scare the
public, see? Cause panic. Police phones ring off the hook. They spend
all their time calming people. Can’t put full resources into finding
Jimmy. Bullshit. I’m not stupid. I’m coming apart here, coming apart .
.. but not stupid.” She almost lost her composure, took a deep breath,
and finished in the same controlled, flat voice, “They just want to shut
me up. Shut me up for twenty-four hours. And I don’t know why.” I
understood Manuel’s motivation for seeking her silence.
He needed to buy time until he could determine whether this was a
conventional crime or one connected to events at Wyvern, because he was
diligent about concealing the latter. Right now he was hoping that the
kidnapper was a common variety of sociopath, a pedophile or satanic
cultist, or someone with a grudge against Lilly. But the perpetrator
might be one of those who were becoming, a man whose DNA was so
disturbed by an aggressive infection of the retrovirus that his
psychology was deteriorating, his sense of humanity dissolving in an
acid of utterly alien urges and needs, compulsions darker and stranger
than even the worst of bestial desires. Or maybe there was another
connection to Wyvern, because these days so much that went wrong in
Moonlight Bay could be traced to those haunted grounds beyond the
chain-link and razor wire.
If Jimmy’s kidnapper was one of the becoming, he’d never stand trial.
If captured, he would be taken to the deeply hidden genetics labs in
Fort Wyvern if they were, as we suspected, still operating, or he would
be transported to a similar and equally secret facility elsewhere, to be
studied and tested, as part of the desperate search for a cure. In that
event, Lilly would be pressured to accept an officially concocted story
of what had happened to her son. If she couldn’t be persuaded, if she
couldn’t be threatened, then she would be killed or railroaded into the
psychiatric ward at Mercy Hospital, in the name of national security and
the public welfare, though in truth she would be sacrificed for no
reason other than to protect the political eminences who had brought us
to this brink.
Sasha came to the table with a cup of tea, which she placed in front of
Lilly. On the saucer was a wedge of lemon. Beside the cup, she put a
cream-and-Sugar set on a matching china tray, with a small silver spoon
for the sugar.
Instead of grounding us in reality, these domestic details gave a
dreamlike quality to the proceedings. If Alice, the White Rabbit, and
the Mad Hatter had joined us at the table, I would not have been