Seize the Night

attention from her clasped hands, she was unable to focus on anything for more than a second or two, perhaps because every object and surface in the kitchen summoned memories of Jimmy, memories that would shatter her selfcontrol if she dared to dwell on them.
    “So I tried a local call. To Ben's mother. My late husband's mother. Jimmy's grandma. She lives across town. Couldn't get a dial tone. Now the phone is dead. No phone at all.”
    From the far end of the kitchen came the clink of china, then the rattle of spoons as Sasha searched through the flatware in a drawer.
    Lilly said, “The cops weren't cops, either. Looked like cops. Uniforms. Badges. Guns. Men I've known all my life. Manuel. He looks like Manuel. Doesn't act like Manuel anymore.”
    “What was different?”
    “They asked a few questions. Scribbled some notes. Made a plaster impression of the footprint. Outside Jimmy's window. Dusted for fingerprints, but not everywhere they should have. It wasn't real. Wasn't thorough at all. They didn't even find the crow.”
    “Crow?”
    “They didn't … care somehow,” she continued, as if she hadn't heard my question, was struggling to understand their indifference.
    “Lou, my father-in-law, used to be a cop. He was thorough. And he cared. What's he have to do with this, anyway? He was a good cop. A kind man. You always knew he cared. Not like … them .”
    I turned to Sasha for some illumination about the crow and Louis Wing.
    She nodded, which I took to mean that she understood and would clue me in later if Lilly, in her distress, didn't make the connections for me.
    Playing devil's advocate, I said to Lilly, “The police have to be detached, impersonal, to do their job right.”
    “It wasn't that. They'll look for Jimmy. They'll investigate. They'll try. I think they will. But they were also … managing me.”
    “Managing?”
    “They said not to talk. Not to anyone. For twenty-four hours. Talking jeopardizes the investigation. Child abductions scare the public, see? Cause panic. Police phones ring off the hook. They spend all their time calming people. Can't put full resources into finding Jimmy. Bullshit. I'm not stupid. I'm coming apart here, coming apart … but not stupid.” She almost lost her composure, took a deep breath, and finished in the same controlled, flat voice, “They just want to shut me up. Shut me up for twenty-four hours. And I don't know why.”
    I understood Manuel's motivation for seeking her silence. He needed to buy time until he could determine whether this was a conventional crime or one connected to events at Wyvern, because he was diligent about concealing the latter. Right now he was hoping that the kidnapper was a common variety of sociopath, a pedophile or satanic cultist, or someone with a grudge against Lilly. But the perpetrator might be one of those who were becoming, a man whose DNA was so disturbed by an aggressive infection of the retrovirus that his psychology was deteriorating, his sense of humanity dissolving in an acid of utterly alien urges and needs, compulsions darker and stranger than even the worst of bestial desires. Or maybe there was another connection to Wyvern, because these days so much that went wrong in Moonlight Bay could be traced to those haunted grounds beyond the chain-link and razor wire.
    If Jimmy's kidnapper was one of the becoming, he'd never stand trial.
    If captured, he would be taken to the deeply hidden genetics labs in Fort Wyvern if they were, as we suspected, still operating, or he would be transported to a similar and equally secret facility elsewhere, to be studied and tested, as part of the desperate search for a cure. In that event, Lilly would be pressured to accept an officially concocted story of what had happened to her son. If she couldn't be persuaded, if she couldn't be threatened, then she would be killed or railroaded into the psychiatric ward at Mercy Hospital, in the name of national security and the public welfare, though in truth she would be sacrificed for no reason other than to protect the political eminences who had brought us to this brink.
    Sasha came to the table with a cup of tea, which she placed in front of Lilly. On the saucer was a wedge of lemon. Beside the cup, she put a cream-and-Sugar set on a matching china tray, with a small silver spoon for the sugar.
    Instead of grounding us in reality, these domestic details gave a dreamlike quality to the proceedings. If Alice, the White Rabbit, and