Petrified Read online

Dan passed her a black leather wallet. She opened it up and saw a photograph of two curly-headed girls about eight or nine years old, one with her two front teeth missing. The victim’s driving license showed a serious, slightly overweight man with the glassy-eyed look of a contact-lens wearer. His name was Steven Caponigro, and he lived at 4414 Buttonwood Avenue, Maple Shade Township, across the river in New Jersey.

  ‘No relation to Tony “Bananas” Caponigro, I suppose?’ asked Jenna, but then she answered her own question. ‘Highly unlikely, if he was living in Maple Shade Township.’

  She took a business card out of his wallet. It told her that Steven Caponigro was senior manager of Maple Shade Realtors.

  ‘Can’t see anybody deliberately wanting to flatten this poor guy. Not unless he’d sold them some overpriced dump that turned out to be riddled with dry rot.’

  ‘You want to talk to any of the witnesses?’ Dan asked her. ‘I’ve asked them to wait, in case you did.’

  Jenna shook her head. ‘You can let them go. It’s pretty obvious what happened here, even if it isn’t explicable.’

  As she circled slowly around the body, she noticed the heavy side door of the convent open up. There was a pause, and then one of the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters stepped out, dressed in the distinctive rose-colored habit that had earned them the nickname of the Pink Sisters.

  The nun hesitated for a moment, and then half-lifted her right hand, as if she were trying to attract Jenna’s attention without appearing too obvious.

  Jenna said, ‘OK, Dan, want to follow up that helicopter thing? Try talking to Stuart What’s-his-face at Columbia Heavy Lift Helicopters.’

  ‘Stuart What’s-his-face?’

  ‘Just ask to speak to the skinny guy who laughs like Pee-Wee Herman. They’ll know who you mean.’

  She maneuvered her way through the assembled police officers and CSIs and walked across the paved area until she reached the convent door. The nun waited for her. As she approached, she lowered her hand and said, ‘Are you a detective?’

  Jenna tugged out her badge. ‘Detective Jenna Pullet, Sister. Did you have something you wanted to tell me?’

  The Pink Sister nodded. She was in her late thirties, maybe thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a face so pale that it was almost ivory. She wore rimless spectacles and her eyebrows were dark and unplucked – yet in a strange, asexual way, she was beautiful, like a medieval painting of a saint, either male or female.

  ‘I felt something,’ she said, with the slightest of lisps.

  ‘You felt something? What do you mean? You felt it when that rock hit the sidewalk? I’m not surprised. It weighed close to a thousand pounds.’

  ‘No. I felt something before it fell.’

  ‘Before it fell?’

  ‘It was during our Eucharistic celebration. We have one every morning at seven. While we were praying in the chapel I felt something pass overhead.’

  ‘I get it. Like a helicopter, or an airplane, something like that?’

  The nun shook her head. ‘It made no sound. It passed overhead like a shadow passing over the sun, that’s the only way that I can describe it.’

  ‘Did you actually see it?’

  ‘No. It was a feeling, that’s all. Dark, and cold, and very evil-hearted.’

  ‘What’s your name, Sister?’ Jenna asked her.

  ‘Sister Mary Emmanuelle.’

  ‘How long have you been a Pink Sister, Mary?’

  ‘Seventeen years this September tenth.’

  ‘So for seventeen long years you’ve been shut up in this convent, praying? I mean, like, this is a very closed community, so far as I understand it? You don’t get out much.’

  ‘We do live a cloistered life, yes. We devote our days and our nights to listening to the Word of God and to keeping a prayerful vigil on behalf of the entire world. But I hope you’re not trying to suggest that my years of seclusion have made me susceptible to delusions.’

  ‘No, no. I’m not suggesting that for a second. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I am. It’s pretty hard for me to understand how you can spend all day every day praying. I’m a Catholic, too, Sister, but I have to confess that there’s a limit to how much praying I can do before I start to feel seriously prayed out. My knees won’t take it, either, not these days.’

  She paused, and then she asked, ‘Did any of your fellow sisters experience this same feeling? This cloud passing over the sun?’

  Sister Mary Emmanuelle shook her head again. ‘If they did, none of them spoke of it.’

  ‘OK . . . so what do you think it was? Do you have any kind of explanation for it? Maybe it was intuition? Or maybe a cloud really did pass over the sun and the chapel physically went colder and darker and for some reason it gave you the heebie-jeebies?’

  ‘I have no explanation for it,’ Sister Mary Emmanuelle admitted. ‘I felt it, and I felt that it was cold and ugly and ill-intentioned. But only seconds later it fell out of the sky and killed that poor man, and that’s why I thought it important for me to tell you what I felt.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Jenna. ‘You said “cold and ugly and ill-intentioned”. It was a half-ton lump of rock, that’s all. How could a half-ton lump of rock be ill-intentioned?’

  Sister Mary Emmanuelle frowned over Jenna’s shoulder toward the fragments of limestone scattered across the pavement.

  ‘It was a living thing, Detective. A creature.’

  ‘A creature? What kind of a creature, exactly?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Please – forget it. I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

  ‘No, Mary. I don’t think that at all. Tell me what kind of a creature. Please.’

  Sister Mary Emmanuelle’s eyes darted from side to side behind her rimless spectacles as if they were trapped. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I should never have mentioned it. To believe in evil is to give it life.’

  ‘Mary – evil is alive and well whether we believe in it or not. I come across evil every day of my life and some of it is totally unbelievable. But it still exists, and all I can do is try to stamp it out.’

  Sister Mary Emmanuelle covered her face with both hands. When she spoke, she spoke so quietly that Jenna had to tilt her head toward her to hear what she was saying.

  ‘It had a face like a demon, ugly beyond all description, with bulging eyes and horns. It had a hunched back and leathery wings. Instead of feet it had claws.’

  She hesitated for a moment, and then she lowered her hands.

  Jenna said, ‘You told me you didn’t see it.’

  ‘I didn’t see it. That was what I felt.’

  ‘You felt bulging eyes and horns? You felt claws instead of feet? I don’t understand what you’re saying. How do you feel claws instead of feet?’

  ‘You think I’m hysterical. You think I’ve been shut up in this convent for too long. You think I’ve been looking at too many illustrations of hell.’

  Jenna didn’t know how to answer that. She patted Sister Mary Emmanuelle on the shoulder and said, ‘OK, Mary . . . thanks for talking to me. I know where to find you if I need to ask you any more questions, don’t I?’

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ said Sister Mary Emmanuelle.

  ‘Of course I believe you. Jesus, you’re a nun.’

  ‘I felt it pass overhead. I felt its coldness. I felt its malevolence. I saw it clearly in my mind’s eye. I promise you in the name of Our Lord that I am telling you the truth.’

  ‘And like I said, Mary, I believe you.’

  Jenna left Sister Mary Emmanuelle at the convent door and walked back to the victim. The crime scene investigators were taking photographs now, and with each flash of their cameras his body seemed to twitch, as if he wasn’t quite dead yet.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Ed Freiburg, nodding his head toward Sister Mary Emmanuelle.

  ‘Are you kidding me? I think too much adoration has gone to her head.’

  ‘Well, we’ll catalog all of the pieces and that should give us some idea of how high this rock was drop
ped from. Maybe that should give us some idea of what it was dropped from, and how.’

  ‘OK. I’m going to drive over to Maple Shade and talk to this unlucky bastard’s nearest and dearest. After that I’ll be back at the district.’

  One of the CSIs called out, ‘Ed! Take a look at this!’ She was holding up a piece of limestone and turning it this way and that.

  Ed went over to see what she wanted, and Jenna followed him. Although one side of the stone was broken and rough, the other side was evenly rippled and smooth, as if it had been fashioned to look like a fold of material.

  Jenna took it and examined it. ‘This has definitely been carved,’ she said. ‘Look, you can see that it’s been chiseled, and then filed.’

  ‘So our vic could have been flattened by a statue?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s see if we can find some more sculpted bits.’

  Ed called out, ‘Can you all take a closer look at these rocks, people, and check if any of them have evidence of carving on them – like this one I’m showing you here!’

  Within a few seconds, one of the police officers held up a triangular fragment of stone and said, ‘Here! This piece has some kind of a wing tip carved on it, by the looks of it.’

  ‘And there’s a kneecap here! Or maybe it’s an elbow.’

  ‘I found a couple of fingers!’

  Over the next ten minutes, the officers brought over more and more pieces of stone that bore unmistakable signs of having been carved. Most of the fragments had been smashed so small that at first sight it was impossible to identify what part of a statue they could be, but Jenna knew that once Ed and his team got them back to their laboratory, they would be able to reassemble them and find out what the figure originally looked like. Two years ago they had reconstructed an antique glass vase that had been shattered into more than three thousand pieces.

  ‘Right,’ said Jenna, checking her watch. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Let me know as soon as you’ve got this baby stuck together again.’

  ‘Oh, for sure. So long as you give us about three months, minimum.’

  She was returning to the squad car when one of the CSIs shouted out, ‘Detective! Detective Pullet!’

  She turned around. The investigator was standing in the raised flower-bed at the side of the convent, more than forty feet away from the point of impact. He was holding up a large gray piece of limestone that looked like a mask that had been broken in half, diagonally. Jenna walked back so that she could look at it more closely.

  ‘Scary-looking sucker, don’t you think?’ said the CSI.

  The piece of limestone must have weighed at least fifteen pounds. It was half of a head, with tangled hair and a single curved horn. Its face had one protuberant eye and a snarling mouth. It had a face like a demon, ugly beyond all description.

  Jenna looked across to the convent’s side door, but Sister Mary Emmanuelle had disappeared now, and the door was closed.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. The very last thing she had wanted to find out was that Sister Mary Emmanuelle might have been telling her the truth.

  SIX

  Tuesday, 2:46 p.m.

  Braydon was dreaming that he was trying to find his way through a cemetery, just as the sun was beginning to go down. A bell was tolling to warn visitors that the cemetery gates would soon be closing for the night, but he knew that he couldn’t leave yet because he hadn’t yet done what he had come here to do.

  The trouble was, he had completely forgotten what it was. Was it to visit somebody’s grave, or was it to meet somebody? Was it to find out if somebody he knew was dead?

  The setting sun made it look as if the trees surrounding the cemetery were on fire, and he had to walk with his hand held up in front of his eyes to stop himself from being dazzled. The gravestones cast extravagantly long shadows across the grass, and his own shadow looked like a circus performer on stilts.

  He reached the intersection of two lines of gravestones and stopped. The cemetery was on a hillside and there was a hot wind blowing. In the distance he could see a dark gray lake, with dark gray clouds gathering over it, and lightning flickering. He could hear thunder, too, and he knew that God was angry with him. At least God didn’t know where he was – not yet, anyhow.

  He hurried on. He could hear crackling and smell smoke. The trees not only looked as if they were on fire, they were on fire. Flames were leaping up and down like hysterical dancers, and the bushes began to sparkle and shrivel up. The wind rose and blew even more strongly, and Braydon suddenly realized that if he didn’t move faster the fire was soon going to encircle him, and he wouldn’t be able to escape. Burned to death in a boneyard, that would be ironic.

  He jogged faster and faster, panting. He jogged past marble cenotaphs and polished granite slabs and statues of weeping angels. The trees were burning more and more fiercely, and now the grass itself was on fire, and the flames were rushing after him as if a fiery rip-tide were coming in.

  As he neared the cemetery gates, he saw that they were closed and locked, and that there was no way out. Black smoke was rolling across the cemetery in dense, choking clouds, and everything was blazing, even the statues of weeping angels, as if they were made of white wax instead of stone.

  Braydon turned around and around, frantically trying to work out how he was going to escape.

  It was then that he heard Sukie’s voice. ‘Daddy?’ she was calling. ‘Daddy, where are you?’

  ‘I’m here, sweetheart!’ Braydon called out. ‘Daddy’s right here!’

  ‘I need you, Daddy! Please, Daddy, come save me! Please!’

  ‘I’m coming, darling! Don’t be frightened! Daddy’s right here!’

  Braydon flailed his way through the thickening smoke, coughing and wheezing. He tripped over the low cast-iron fencing around somebody’s granite sepulcher, and stumbled through the flower vases in front of somebody else’s headstone. But then the smoke cleared a little and he saw Sukie standing on a white marble plinth, holding Binkie tightly in her arms.

  ‘I’m here, sweetheart! I’m right here! Let’s get you out of this horrible place!’

  Sukie was wearing the same red sweater and the same OshKosh dungarees that she had been wearing when he had kidnapped her from Miranda’s parents’ house. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and braided into pigtails, with red ribbons tied in a bow. To Braydon’s bewilderment, though, her eyes were closed.

  ‘Daddy! I need you, Daddy! Please come save me!’

  ‘I’m here! Open your eyes, sweetheart! I’m right here in front of you!’

  ‘Save me, Daddy! Save me!’

  As he came nearer, Sukie opened her eyes. Braydon said, ‘Oh my God! Oh, sweet Jesus!’ Both of her eyes were completely blood red, and translucent, as if she were a vampire.

  Braydon had been ready to reach out and scoop her up, but now he hesitated. ‘What’s happened, Sukie? What’s happened to your eyes?’

  ‘Save me, Daddy! Don’t let me burn!’

  ‘I won’t, sweetheart. I promise.’ He coughed, and he coughed, and for a while he couldn’t stop himself from coughing, and he ended up by retching. ‘Here – let’s get the hell out of here, before it’s too late!’

  But it was already too late. Sukie’s cherubic, heart-shaped face was beginning to melt – as if she, too, were molded out of wax. Her cheeks slid slowly downward and her lips curled, and then her eyelids drooped like a very old woman.

  ‘It hurts, Daddy! It hurts so much!’ she repeated, but her throat was constricted and her words were thick and sticky and Braydon could barely understand her. He stayed where he was, unable to move. His brain simply couldn’t work out what messages to send to his legs and his arms to make them work, and go to her, and pick her up.

  Sukie’s forehead collapsed, and then her doll Binkie caught fire, and started to blaze fiercely in her arms. The flames from Binkie’s nylon hair licked at Sukie’s face, and she started to burn, too. Her skin, her flesh, her pigtails. She burned so fiercely that Braydon c
ould feel the heat on his outstretched hands.

  He didn’t know how long she burned. Eventually, however, her head collapsed into her neck, and then her chest collapsed, and then she was nothing but two burning legs supporting a burning pelvis, like some kind of sacrificial bowl.

  Braydon managed to take one step back, and then another. His eyes were crowded with tears and his throat was raw. His lungs were so filled with smoke that he couldn’t even cough.

  Sukie. I killed you. Sukie, I burned you alive. How can you ever forgive me?

  A woman’s voice very close to his left ear said, ‘Mr Harris? Are you awake?’

  Braydon opened his eyes. He was lying on one of two beds in a small recovery room. A black nurse in a pale blue uniform was leaning over him with her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘How do you feel?’ the nurse asked him. ‘Do you feel any pain?’

  He lifted his head, and saw that his right arm was supported by a gray vinyl sling, and that his right wrist was encased in a hard white plaster cast. He could feel a dull, underlying throbbing, but no real pain.

  ‘I’m OK. I think I’m OK. Where am I?’

  ‘You’re in the specialist burns unit at Temple University Hospital. You’ve been sleeping for over an hour now.’

  ‘Temple University Hospital?’

  ‘Philadelphia, Mr Harris.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. ‘Sukie.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the nurse. ‘But Doctor Berman has made your daughter comfortable, and she’s not in any pain. You can come and see her now. Let me help you put on your shoes.’

  Braydon rolled himself sideways on the bed and managed to sit up. When he tried to stand up, however, his knees gave way and he promptly sat back down again. The nurse took hold of his elbow and helped him to his feet. ‘How bad is she?’ he croaked.

  ‘Well, you can see for yourself. She has deep facial burns, but Doctor Berman is brilliant when it comes to treating children with injuries like hers.’

  ‘I thought – I dreamed she was dead.’

  ‘She’s a very sick little girl, Mr Harris. She has damage to her mouth and throat and lungs, and her digestive tract, too. But, like I say, Doctor Berman is one of the world’s leading specialists when it comes to pediatric burns.’