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Homicide Detective Steven Mulvehill stood beside Remy, as the team from the medical examiner's office prepared to remove the bodies from the motel room. Remy leaned against his car, arms crossed. The two friends were silent as they watched the activity across the lot.
A small crowd had formed, kept at bay by a strip of yellow crime-scene tape and four uniformed officers. The curious pack craned their necks, moving from one end of the tape to the other, eager to catch a glimpse of something to fill the misery quotient in their lives. It was something that Remy had never really understood but had come to accept: the human species was enthralled with the pain of others. Whether a natural disaster or a drive-by shooting, the average Joe wanted to hear every detail. Maybe the fascination stemmed from the fact that somebody else had incurred the wrath of the fates, and he, for the moment, could breathe a sigh of relief.
Mulvehill and his partner, Rich Healey, had already examined the scene in the motel room and released the bodies to the coroner. Healey was still inside, supervising the removal.
The detective took a long drag of a cigarette, expelled the smoke from his nostrils like some great medieval beast, then broke the uncomfortable silence. "You all right?" he asked. "You're kind of quiet." He took another pull from his smoke.
Remy stared straight ahead, his eyes focused on the entryway of the room across the lot. "He saw me, Steven. Right before that guy killed himself, he really saw me."
Mulvehill was a stocky man, average height with a wild head of thick, black hair. He was forty-seven years old, divorced, and living the job. Remy had met him more than five years earlier, when a homicide investigation had intersected with a missing-persons case he had been working on. The two had been friends ever since.
"He saw me for what I really am," Remy said again, truly disturbed by what he was saying.
Mulvehill looked at Remy, the last of the cigarette protruding from the corner of his mouth. "What, a shitty detective?" The cop smirked, taking the smoke from his mouth and flicking the remains to the ground.
The case that had first brought them together had ended badly, the murder suspect dead and Mulvehill with a bullet in his gut.
"You're a riot," Remy responded. "The stuff of Vegas floor shows. Really, if this cop thing doesn't work out…"
Mulvehill laughed out loud as he reached into his sports jacket for his pack of cigarettes. "And you're an asshole. Tell me again what you were doing here." He pulled one from the pack and placed it in his mouth. "Very smooth, Detective." Remy gri
Mulvehill lit up with an old-fashioned Zippo. He flicked the cover closed with a metallic click, then slipped it back inside his pocket next to the cigarette pack. He took a long, thoughtful drag. Smoking helped him think, he often said. Helped him focus. He'd tried to stop once, but it had made him stupid.
"So he shows up here with his secretary, they go in, and after a while you hear the first shot?"
Remy nodded. "That's about it. By the time I got in there, he'd already killed the woman. I think he was getting ready to shoot himself, but I interrupted him."
The homicide detective idly brushed some ash from the lapel of his navy blue sports coat. "So you think this guy could somehow see you — the real you."
Mulvehill had been near death when Remy found him lying in a pool of blood in an abandoned waterfront warehouse. To ease his suffering and calm the terrified detective, Remy had revealed his true countenance. Death is only a new begi
Remy nodded, replaying the conversation with Mountgomery inside his head. "I didn't drop the facade at all, haven't done it in a long time. But the way he looked at me — and that smile. He was definitely seeing something."
The doctors said it was a miracle that Mulvehill had survived the shooting. After his recovery, the homicide detective had come looking for Remy, who had denied nothing — and offered nothing. But Mulvehill knew he had encountered something very much out of the ordi- nary, something that couldn't simply be attributed to loss of blood.
Remy knew that Mulvehill's mother and grandmother had been strict Catholics, and had tried to raise him in the faith as well. As a young man, he had gone to church to please them, but he had believed Christian doctrine to be nothing more than fairy tales, fantasies to relieve the fears of the devoted when faced with their own mortality. But since his own brush with death, and his encounter with a certain private investigator, the Boston detective wasn't quite sure what he believed anymore. In fact, he'd even started to attend Mass again. Just to be on the safe side, he'd told Remy.
But Remy had shown Mulvehill his true face by design. He had revealed himself on purpose. This was something else altogether. This dead man had seen beneath his mask.
"That ever happen before?" Mulvehill asked, interrupting Remy's brooding. "Besides when you wanted it to, I mean?"
Remy looked at his friend. "Not to me, but throughout the ages there have been holy men, visionaries, who could glimpse the unseen world and its inhabitants — usually before some kind of change in the world — something of great religious significance."
Mulvehill sucked a final drag from his cigarette. "Anything coming down the pike that you know of? New pope or something?"
Remy shrugged. "Well, the guy did talk about having dreams about the end of the world, the Apocalypse. He thought he was doing the woman a favor by killing her, thought I was here to take them up to Heaven."
Mulvehill looked at his friend with a serious expression, a new, unlit cigarette having appeared almost magically in his mouth. "When the time comes, will you carry me up to Heaven?" he asked, fishing for his lighter.
Remy gri
Their playful banter was cut short by a sudden commotion. Healey ran from the motel room and beckoned to one of the uniforms. They exchanged some words and the cop spoke rapidly into his radio, then followed the detective back into the room. Mulvehill grumbled beneath his breath, threw his latest smoke to the ground, and hurried toward the crime scene.
Remy followed, that strange, uneasy feeling in his gut returning.
"What's going on?" Mulvehill asked a second uniformed officer who stood just outside the motel room.
An ambulance pulled into the parking lot, sirens wailing, and screeched to a halt in front of the open door. Two EMTs jumped into action, hauling open the doors at the back of the vehicle and removing their equipment. Another ambulance had been there a short while ago, but it was gone now. There had been no lives for its technicians to save.
The uniform speaking to Mulvehill appeared shaken. He made brief eye contact with the detective and then looked back into the room, which buzzed with surprising activity. "I think the other detective said something about them being alive."
A harried-looking paramedic pulling a stretcher barked for them to get out of the way as he pushed through the door. Another followed with a second stretcher at his heels.
There was a growing excitement among the gathered crowd, anticipation crackling in the air. They moved closer, an undulating organism hungry for anguish not their own.
Mulvehill shoved the officer aside and stormed into room 35, with Remy close behind. The blanket-covered bodies of Peter Mountgomery and Carol Weir were atop the stretchers, oxygen masks on their faces. They were deathly pale, the damage done by gunfire blatantly evident. How could they possibly be alive?