Night Terrors Read Free

were those with which I was intimately familiar myself.
    Especially tonight. January 6th. The Feast of the Epiphany. Like many another lapsed Catholic, though I’d fallen away from the faith and no longer attended Mass, the dates of the Holy Days are indelibly etched in my mind.
    Historically, the Feast of the Epiphany marked the final day of the Christmas celebration, though most stores and homes had long since taken down the holiday lights and ornaments, the yuletide trees and the mistletoe.
    January 6th. The same date, many years ago, when my wife Barbara and I had come out of a restaurant down at the Point, only to be mugged by some armed thug in a hoodie.
    I’d been an amateur boxer in my youth—Golden Gloves, Pan Am games—so when the thief started to manhandle my wife, I tried to intercede. The gun, a 9 mm Glock, went off. Three quick shots.
    The one that entered my skull kept me in the hospital for months. The two that entered Barbara’s heart killed her.
    For two long years after that, I felt like my life was over, too. Then, with help, I managed to move through the layers of remorse and shame—the paralysis of survivor guilt—to come out on the other side with a renewed sense of purpose. Something I’d rarely known before, having been wrapped up solely in my career, my ambition, my own needs and wants.
    This coincided with the arrest and conviction of a notorious serial killer named Troy David Dowd. Dubbed “the Handyman” by the media, he’d killed and dismembered twelve people with pliers, screwdrivers, and other tools before his eventual capture.
    One of his two surviving victims, a middle-aged single mother, had been so traumatized by her ordeal that the police were concerned about her welfare. Particularly Angie Villanova, who, in addition to her position in the department, was a distant cousin of mine. It was she who referred the woman to me, and it was this experience that led to my signing on as a consultant to the Pittsburgh Police.
    I sat back in my swivel chair, bracing myself with a knee against the edge of the desk. I didn’t have to turn my head to to hear—even feel—the push of the wind against the window glass. The storm was increasing in intensity, as though gathering strength from the approaching darkness of night.
    What, I wondered, should I do? Go down to the parking garage, pull out onto the snow-draped streets, and fight my way through the log-jam of cars for home?
    There was every good reason not to. The weather, the traffic, the potentially treacherous climb up the steep winding road to Grandview Avenue, my street.
    But there was also one very good reason to make the trip: which was so that I could do what I always did on the night of January 6th. Go home, turn off all the lights, put on Gerry Mulligan’s recording of “The Lonely Night”—a song he wrote with his wife, the actress Judy Holliday, shortly before her death—and then, quietly and without any fuss, get sincerely drunk. My annual ritual. For Barbara.
    Though with every passing year, it was a ritual that seemed more and more pro forma. Mere habit. Having less to do with the person Barbara was, and more to do with some image of myself as loyal. Steadfast in my memory of her loss. The grieving widower.
    I pushed away from my desk and stood. Stretched. Feeling suddenly exposed. Discovered.
    After all, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been involved with women since Barbara’s death. Obsessively involved, in one particular case.
    And even as I contemplated the journey home to honor Barbara’s memory with booze and self-pity, wasn’t I now attracted to another woman? Someone with whom I’d worked closely on a police investigation last summer?
    These conflicting thoughts were still swirling around in my mind when the office phone rang, jolting me out of my reverie. It was a Detective Chief Avery Block, phoning from West Virginia, who said