Seize the Night

behind the Nine Palms Plaza.”
    Nine Palms was a shopping center that lost all the tenants when Fort Wyvern closed and took with it the billion dollars a year that it had pumped into the county economy. These days the shop windows at Nine Palms are boarded over, weeds bristle from cracks in the blacktop parking lot, and six of the namesake palms are withered, brown, and so dead that they have been abandoned by tree rats.
    The chamber of commerce likes to call Moonlight Bay the Jewel of the Central Coast. The town remains charming, graced with fine architecture and lovely tree-lined streets, but the economic scars of Wyvern's closure are visible everywhere. The jewel is not as bright as it once was.
    “They searched all the empty shops in Nine Palms,” Bobby said, “afraid they'd find Wendy's body, but she wasn't there.”
    “She's alive,” I said.
    Bobby looked at me pityingly.
    “They're all alive,” I insisted. “They have to be.”
    I wasn't speaking from reason now. I was speaking from my belief in miracles.
    “Another crow,” Bobby said. “Mary called it a blackbird. It was left on the car seat. In the drawing, the bird is diving for prey.”
    “Message?”
    “George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.” Mary's husband was Frank Dulcinea. “Who the hell is George?”
    “Frank's grandfather. He's dead now. Used to be a judge in the county court system.”
    “Dead how long?”
    “Fifteen years.” I was baffled and frustrated. “If this abb is kidnapping for vengeance, what's the point of nabbing Wendy to get even with a man who's been dead fifteen years? Wendy's great-grandfather was gone long before she was even born. He never knew her. How could you get satisfaction from taking vengeance on a dead man?”
    “Maybe it makes perfect sense if you're an abb,” Bobby said, “with a screwed-up brain.”
    “I guess.”
    “Or maybe this whole crow thing is just cover, to make everyone think these kids were snatched by your standard-issue pervert, when maybe they're really being caged in a lab somewhere.”
    “Maybe, maybe, you're full of too damn many maybes,” I said.
    He shrugged. “Don't look to me for wisdom. I'm just a wave-thrashing board head. This killer you mentioned. The guy in the news. He leave crows like this?”
    “Not that I've read.”
    “Serial killers, don't they sometimes leave things like this?”
    “Yeah. They're called signatures . Like a writer's byline. Taking credit for the work.”
    I checked my wristwatch. Sunset would arrive in about five hours.
    We would be ready to go back to Wyvern by then. And even if we were not ready, we would go.

TWO
NEVERLAND

18
    With a second bottle of Mountain Dew in hand, Bobby sat on the cellist's stool, but he didn't pick up the bow.
    In addition to all the instruments and the composition table, the former dining room contained a music system with a CD player and an antiquated audiotape deck. In fact, there were two decks, which allowed Sasha to duplicate tapes of her own recordings. I powered up the equipment, which added as much feeble illumination to the room as the dreary daylight that seeped in at the edges of the blinds.
    Sometimes, after composing a tune, Sasha is convinced that she has unwittingly plagiarized another songwriter. To satisfy herself that her work is original, she spends hours listening to cuts from which she suspects she has borrowed, until finally she's willing to believe that her creation has, after all, sprung solely from her own talent.
    Her music is the only thing about which Sasha exhibits more than a healthy measure of self-doubt. Her cooking, her literary opinions, her lovemaking, and all the other things she does so wonderfully are marked by a wholesome confidence and by no more than a useful amount of second-guessing. In her relationship to her music, however, she is sometimes a lost child, when she's stricken by this vulnerability, I want more than ever to put my arm around her and to comfort her—though this is when she's most likely to reject comforting and to rap me across the knuckles with her flute, her scaling ruler, or another handy music-room weapon.
    I suppose every relationship can be enriched by a small measure of neurotic behavior. I certainly contribute a half cup of my own to our recipe.
    Now I slipped the tape into the player. It was the cassette I'd found in the envelope beside Leland Delacroix's reeking corpse in the bungalow kitchen in Dead Town.
    I turned the chair away from