Prodigal Son

"the magician had two hearts… and he was stabbed in both."
        A flutter of wings overhead drew Deucalion's attention.
        "Bird got in yesterday," Jelly said. "A dove, by the look of it. Haven't been able to chase it out."
        Deucalion tracked the trapped bird's flight. He knew how it felt.

CHAPTER 11
        
        CARSON LIVED ON A tree-lined street in a house nondescript except for a gingerbread veranda that wrapped three sides.
        She parked at the curb because the garage was packed with her parents' belongings, which she never found time to sort through.
        On her way to the kitchen door, she paused under an oak draped with Spanish moss. Her work hardened her, wound her tight. Arnie, her brother, needed a gentle sister. Sometimes she couldn't decompress during the walk from car to house; she required a moment to herself.
        Here in the humid night and the fragrance of jasmine, she found that she couldn't shift into domestic gear. Her nerves were twisted as tight as dreadlocks, and her mind raced. As never before, the scent of jasmine reminded her of the smell of blood.
        The recent killings had been so gruesome and had occurred in such rapid succession that she could not put them aside during her personal time. Under normal circumstances, she was seventy percent cop, thirty percent woman and sister; these days, she was all cop, twenty-four/seven.
        When Carson entered the kitchen, Vicky Chou had just loaded the dishwasher and switched it on. "Well, I screwed up."
        "Don't tell me you put laundry in the dishwasher."
        "Worse. With his brisket of beef, I gave him carrots and peas."
        "Oh, never orange and green on the same plate, Vicky."
        Vicky sighed. "He's got more rules about food than kosher and vegan combined."
        On a cop's salary, Carson could not have afforded a live-in caregiver to look after her autistic brother. Vicky took the job in return for room and board-and out of gratitude.
        When Vicky's sister, Liane, had been indicted with her boyfriend and two others for conspiracy to commit murder, she seemed helplessly snared in a web of evidence. She'd been innocent. In the process of sending the other three to prison, Carson had cleared Liane.
        As a successful medical transcriptionist, Vicky worked flexible hours at home, transcribing micro-cassettes for physicians. If Arnie had been a more demanding autistic, Vicky might not have been able to keep up with her work, but the boy was mostly quiescent.
        Widowed at forty, now forty-five, Vicky was an Asian beauty, smart and sweet and lonely. She wouldn't grieve forever. Someday when she least expected it, a man would come into her life, and the current arrangement would end.
        Carson dealt with that possibility the only way that her busy life allowed: She ignored it.
        "Other than green and orange together, how was he today?" Carson asked.
        "Fixated on the castle. Sometimes it seems to calm him, but at other times…" Vicky frowned. "What is he so afraid of?"
        "I don't know. I guess… life."
        
        BY REMOVING A WALL and combining two of the upstairs bedrooms, Carson had given Arnie the largest room in the house. This seemed only fair because his condition stole from him the rest of the world.
        His bed and nightstand were shoved into a corner. A TV occupied a wheeled metal stand. Sometimes he watched cartoons on DVD, the same ones over and over.
        The remainder of the room had been devoted to the castle.
        Four low sturdy tables formed a twelve-by-eight-foot platform. Upon the tables stood an architectural wonder in Lego blocks.
        Few boys of twelve would have been able to create a model castle without a plan, but Arnie had put together a masterpiece: walls and wards, barbicon and bastions, ramparts and parapets, turreted towers, the barracks, the chapel, the armory, the castle keep with elaborate bulwark and battlements.
        He'd been obsessed with the model for weeks, constructing it in an intense silence. Repeatedly he tore down finished sections only to remodel and improve them.
        Most of the time he was on his feet while adding to the castle-an access hole in the table arrangement allowed him to build from within the project as well as from every side-but sometimes, like now, he worked while sitting on a wheeled stool. Carson rolled a second stool to the table