When Shadows Come Read online

  PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI

  “Sensational . . . Masterful . . . Brilliant.” —New York Post

  “Riveting . . . [A] chilling tale of obsessive love from Thriller Award–winner Zandri.” —Publishers Weekly

  “The action never wanes.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical, and haunting.” —Harlan Coben, bestselling author of Six Years

  “Tough, stylish, heartbreaking.” —Don Winslow, bestselling author of Savages

  “Non-stop action.” —I Love a Mystery

  “Vincent Zandri nails readers’ attention.” —Boston Herald

  “[Zandri] demonstrates an uncanny knack for exposition, introducing new characters and narrative possibilities with the confidence of an old pro . . . Zandri does a superb job interlocking puzzle pieces.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Well worth every minute . . .” —Suspense Magazine

  OTHER NOVELS BY VINCENT ZANDRI

  The Remains

  The Concrete Pearl

  Permanence

  Scream Catcher

  Everything Burns

  Orchard Grove

  THE CHASE BAKER SERIES

  The Shroud Key

  Chase Baker and the Golden Condor

  Chase Baker and the God Boy

  Chase Baker and the Lincoln Curse

  THE JACK MARCONI PI NOVELS

  The Innocent

  Godchild

  The Guilty

  THE DICK MOONLIGHT PI NOVELS

  Moonlight Falls

  Moonlight Mafia

  Moonlight Rises

  Blue Moonlight

  Murder by Moonlight

  Moonlight Sonata

  Full Moonlight

  Moonlight Breaks Bad

  Moonlight Weeps

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Vincent Zandri

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503934238

  ISBN-10: 1503934233

  Cover design by Stewart Williams

  For Laura, because I found you again.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “They lay together now and did not speak and the Colonel felt her heart beat.”

  —Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees

  “The important aspect of the mind’s extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego states would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the truth, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought.”

  —Lynn Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country

  Chapter 1

  Venice, Italy

  Fall, 2012

  A stranger is watching us.

  Has been for ten minutes now.

  Or maybe I should say, I’m convinced he’s been watching us. I feel his eyes, like you’d feel two lasers burning holes into your skin. A pair of obsidian dark irises set inside deep sockets on the face of a man standing stone-still, barely twenty feet away from the table I share with my fiancée.

  The man who is eyeing me . . . eyeing Grace . . . is maybe forty years old. He’s tall. Taller than my five feet ten inches. He’s got short, dark, almost-black hair and a matching black beard that’s cropped close. He wears a long overcoat that, at present, is getting soaked in a rain that’s been falling on and off since we arrived a week ago.

  But here’s the catch: I’m blind.

  I can’t actually see him.

  Can’t physically see him right now, anyway, which is why I have no choice but to rely on Grace. My affliction, if you want to call it that, is intermittent, what the specialists term a temporary “hysterical” blindness brought on by the effects of the war. A byproduct of post-traumatic stress disorder, or what we old grunts refer to as the dreaded PTS fucking D.

  In other words, the darkness comes and goes. Sometimes it occurs in just one eye, but more often in both. On other occasions, the loss of vision is partial. It can last a while, as in days. Or it can last an hour here, an hour there. There are times when the blindness isn’t even blindness, but the abrupt appearance of spots that block my field of vision like a thousand miniature white bats flying at my face.

  Today I’m not seeing squat.

  Not so much as my own hand in front of my own face. Certainly not the creep who’s been staring at us. But the blindness has taught me one thing: you don’t need a working pair of eyes to actually see something, especially when that something might be a threat.

  The threat?

  Am I being paranoid? Is Grace overreacting?

  I can’t see him, but I know he’s still there. Standing not twenty feet away, gazing at us, watching us, surveying us. I’m a professional soldier. A lifer. I’m trained to sense these things even when the night vision goes
out. It helps that Grace has nervously described him to me with the exact detail and nuance of one of her Paris Review poems.

  “Should we stay or should we run now?” I sing, somewhat under my breath.

  “Or maybe we should sit tight and ignore him,” Grace asserts. “We’ve got every right to enjoy ourselves.”

  “You got a point, Gracie. Maybe he’s not really looking at us, but something else entirely. Something over our heads. Or maybe he’s spacing out, looking at something inside his own head. Happens all the time, right?”

  But just how long we can hold out . . . I can hold out . . . is anybody’s guess. I’m a dog of war. The blood speeds through my veins at the first sign of trouble, and the battlefield fury rages inside my brain. There’s no reaching for your sidearm or your eight-inch fighting knife in Venice, and I’d rather Grace never know the fury firsthand.

  For now, we occupy ourselves with playing one of Grace’s “get better fast” healing games. A game, incidentally, that never ceases to drive me batty, no matter how much I’m learning to love this woman all over again.

  “Now feel this, Captain.” Her voice is hardly more than a whisper, but her tone is insistent. Strong. I hear the movement of her hands on the metal caffè table. The rain is steady and loud as it sprays against the canopy above us, yet quiet and soothing when it showers the cobblestones in the piazza.

  I hear more since I began sliding in and out of blindness six weeks ago. I hear the sounds of wineglasses clinking, plates shifting across circular tabletops, knives and forks meeting ceramic. I hear the birds, the barking of dogs, the purring of cats. I hear voices. The steady murmur of voices. Inside and outside my head. But right now . . . right this very second . . . I listen only to Grace.

  My Grace.

  “Come on, Nick. Clear your brain and concentrate. Do it for me. Do it for us.” Her hand curves against my cheek, softly, for just a second.

  The eyes of a stranger on me . . . on us . . .

  I want to put my hands on him, wrap them around his neck, thumb pressed against his carotid artery, his overstressed pulse pumping faster and faster until, boom, his heart seizes up. Or perhaps a full nelson will do, both my arms shoved under his, hands locked against the back of his head, bending his neck until it breaks. Lately, my imagination scares me.

  Cupping my hands, I set them palm up on the table. It comes as a slight surprise when Grace touches my fingertips. I feel the ticklish drag of her fingernails against my palms and the cool damp of the metal table against the backs of my hands. Hands that have reached an age when a soldier like me, well versed in bringing death, should have put the wars behind him.

  “Look at me,” she says, and that’s when I begin to laugh. But she tells me to keep my head straight and it suddenly comes to me: my eyes are drifting again. When the blindness comes (once for two full days), my eyes are not a part of me anymore. They are no longer in my control. They become rudderless brown boats drifting in pools of tears.

  “Get ready, Captain Nick.” She grabs hold of my hand, sets a small object in it, folds my fingers into a loose fist. “Okay, what, pray tell, do you feel?”

  This one is simple. A small metallic band to which a jagged stone is attached. The engagement ring I bought for her fourteen months ago, before I shipped out on what I promised would be my last Afghan tour . . . a forty-six-year-old career captain brought to his knees by a younger woman.

  What I’m experiencing is not so simple. Gracie makes me feel like a child learning to speak, learning to crawl. Maybe I should remind her that of course I’m able to recognize something obvious like a ring made of platinum. Or maybe I should explain that being blind is not so much having lost my vision as it is learning to see things in other ways. I must rely on touching, smelling, listening. Remembering. I have to learn how to feel all over again.

  But I have not lost my memory, which means I can recall the simple shape and cold metal touch of a ring almost as well as I recall Grace’s radiant green eyes, smooth, tan face, and shoulder-length dark brown hair.

  “FYI for Grace Blunt,” I say. “I’m ready for something more challenging than engagement rings.”

  I listen for the light tone of Grace’s voice. But it doesn’t come. Her silence might be as cold and hard as her diamond, but it also means I’m not ready for something more challenging yet. It means that, in her eyes anyway, I need to make more progress before she’ll push me too hard.

  Here’s what I do in the name of progress: I open my fingers, allow Grace’s engagement ring to slip from my grasp, like the pin on a hand grenade. When the ring drops through the humid air, it makes not a sound. But that single half second of silence is followed by the metallic jingle of the ring landing and spinning on the cobblestones.

  The table tilts against my hard belly. Even if I can’t see her, I know Grace is reacting to the dropped engagement ring like a mother to a wayward child. She’s jumped up from her chair with blinding speed.

  “Please sit, Grace,” I say, now feeling like a jerk for having dropped the ring on purpose. “I’ll find it. I promise I will find it.”

  “Wow, never mind the eyes,” she grouses under her breath. “What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the same old Nick Angel. As always, I have no idea who the hell you really are.”

  But I think what she’s really trying to say is this: she doesn’t know what I’m capable of, now that the war is over for me but has only just begun for us.

  I lean hard to one side and nearly fall over, but manage to regain my balance by grasping the metal table. I search with my fingers in the linear spaces between the cobbles, through the chunks of wet, sandy dirt, rotting food, and spent cigarette butts.

  Grace inhales, exhales, clearly trying to rein in her anger. Nobody wants to be pissed off in Venice.

  “Forget that creepo in the overcoat,” she says. “Everybody is staring now, screw you very much.” The leather on her coat rubs audibly against the table when she slides back into her seat. “God, the whole joint is looking at us.”

  “I’m making a scene. My Lord, say it ain’t so. Maybe you should call Andrew. Ask him what he would do.”

  She falls silent for a beat. Then, “Something you want to discuss with me, Nick, that we haven’t already discussed one thousand times already? Some things you just have to learn to forget.”

  I go into lockjaw mode. Because who am I to reveal my true feelings? I’m a rawhide-tough soldier of fortune. A man who can take the torture without cracking. “I think it’s nice you and the ex are getting on swimmingly again after so much time. Tell me, Gracie, does the English professor still wear bright red socks with his loafers?”

  I laugh like something’s hilarious. Without needing to see them, I can tell the entire crowd is once again eyeing us.

  “Sorry for picking on Andrew,” I say, picturing the ring I have yet to recover. “And I don’t mean to keep attracting unnecessary attention, especially with Mr. Creepo over there.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you, does it?” Skin glides against skin as she rubs her empty finger. “You can’t see anyone.”

  “Oh, now, that hurts.”

  Here’s the way I look at it, if you’ll pardon the pun: Grace is right. What other people see doesn’t matter. It’s not like I’m about to get naked in front of them. But being sightless definitely has its perks. It makes me feel superhero-invisible.

  On the other hand, that stranger in the overcoat is not something I can so easily ignore, no matter how many times I tell myself I’m imagining his gaze, that the telltale hair-raising tickle at the base of my neck is wrong.

  “This is silly,” says Grace. “Why don’t I pick the ring up for you?”

  “Patience, Grace. Patience.”

  I continue probing, feeling. I try to see with my fingers, like I’m reaching for the extra ammo clip I set out on the ground before the shooting started. I discover the ring wedged between two cobblestones. My gut instinct is to toss it away. Toss it out of the square an
d into the canal. Toss it away for good, like a man who knows how to take control. A man who is whole. A man who is in command of his senses.

  I can’t help imagining it flying above the tables, above the heads of the seeing people, above the head of Mr. Creepo. So here’s what I do instead: I raise the ring up and hold it above the table like a magician who’s pulled off a fantastic illusion. The hand quicker than the eye. The hand better than the eye.

  Out of nowhere comes the feeling of another hand against mine as Grace snatches her diamond away from my now-filthy fingers.

  “Can we please stop horsing around?” she asks.

  I press my lips together and whinny.

  “Not funny, Mr. Ed. Everyone thinks we’re fighting.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “We’re talking. Just like the old days. I reveal a little bit about myself here, a little there. And you just clam up or better yet, say stupid shit to avoid reality.” She giggles. “Maybe that’s why you like running away to war so much. Tell me, Captain, when exactly are you planning on shipping out again? Or were you going to wait until your eyes recovered before laying that one on me?”

  “You know what, Gracie?” I say. “How’s this for the truth: I love you more than myself, and you know that. You are my state of Grace. But what you need right now is another drink. Kill that bug up your perfectly shaped P90X behind.”

  Maybe she’s smiling.

  “It’s not funny, Nick. You can’t see them. You can’t feel their eyes.”

  But she’s wrong. I feel them all right. The same way you feel the ceasing heart of a man you’ve just shot from two hundred feet away. The same way you feel a bad dream hours after you wake up, even if the dream is already forgotten. The same way I feel the stranger’s eyes aimed at me.

  “You really should have spent some time in the Peace Corps before art school, Grace. A little blood, guts, and shit on your boots makes you pretty indifferent to people who like to stare.”

  I shout the word “Stare!” and the whole joint goes quiet. I can’t help but laugh. Sometimes you have to look on the bright side, even when all you see is darkness.