Free Darkness peering by Alice Blanchard Page A

D'Agostino's death troubled him a great deal. You know, he didn't
drink, didn't smoke ... didn't have the kind of vices most people use
to numb their pain with."
    She blinked back the tears that had inexplicably sprung to her eyes.
"Do you know why my father killed himself, Reverend?"
    "It's the grip of Satan," he whispered, his slender fingers encircling
her wrist. "He's got a grip on this world like you wouldn't
believe."
    With a shiver, she reclaimed her hand.

    RACHEL GOT TO THE STATION AROUND MIDNIGHT. THE OVERhead fluorescent
light in the storage room kept flickering on and off as she rummaged
through stacks of dusty cardboard boxes until she found what she was
looking for. She pulled out Melissa D'Agostino's case file, its worn
seams held together by silver duct tape, a round orange sticker on the
front indicating that the case remained unsolved. She felt the kind of
elation and sense of discovery she'd rarely experienced in her four
short years on the force and didn't stop reading until three hours
later, when she went home exhausted.
    At eight o'clock the following morning, Rachel walked into the chief's
office and shut the door behind her. Police Chief Jim McKissack, at
fifty, was a brash combative man with a voice as scratchy as beard
burn. He was leaning back in his chair, talking on the phone. When he
saw her, he took his feet off his desk and shot forward. "Yeah," he
said into the receiver, "okay ... call me back this afternoon." He
hung up.
    She dropped the case file on his desk. "I can't believe you never told
me about this."
    He glanced at the file. "I didn't think it was relevant."
    "Not relevant?" Her face flushed. "Not relevant that my brother came
this close to being a murder suspect?"
    McKissack shrugged. "Put a police officer in a dark room with a
sixteen-year-old boy and you could probably get him to say he was on
the grassy knoll in 1963."
    "So you don't think Billy had anything to do with it?"
    "I didn't say that." He gestured for her to sit, but she kept pacing
back and forth in front of his desk. The office was warm.

    Stuffy. She studied his impassive face and wondered if he was
deliberately trying to provoke her. His eyes were the solid color of
dusk, without any specks or flaws in the iris.
    "So what are you saying, McKissack?"
    "That he was guilty of being an impressionable kid who hung out with
the wrong crowd. Siddown, you're making me seasick."
    She slumped in the wooden captain's chair, trying to solve in an
instant what had remained a mystery for almost eighteen years. "The
cats were this big deal in our house. I remember my father being so
outraged, and Billy just moping around and basically feeling rotten.
My friends and I would scare each other to death with decapitated-cat
stories, but after a while, nobody mentioned it anymore, and sometimes
I thought I must've dreamt it."
    "Oh it's true, all right." McKissack lit a cigarette and gazed at her
over the curl of smoke. His hard-muscled body was full of compressed,
unreleased energy. She didn't know how to bridge the gap between them.
They'd ended their affair three months ago. McKissack was married, and
she knew his wife, Sheila. She liked Sheila, and she'd met his kids,
ages ten, twelve, and fourteen. Good kids. A wonderful family.
Still, her desire for him was as smooth and light as water.
    "I've always had a sense there was some connection between my father's
suicide and the dead cats, but I couldn't be sure. I had this vague
feeling it had something to do with the retarded girl, too, but I
didn't know how, exactly." She stood up and leaned against his desk.
"You don't honestly think the two cases are related, do your"
    He considered her question, eyes narrowing. "I think there's a
connection because it was the same kids involved, yeah. And we found a
cat bell in Melissa D'Agostino's hand ..."
    "That disappeared, I know. You don't think--?"
    "I'll tell you what I think if you'll sit down a