Night Terrors Read online

  Praise for Night Terrors

  “Authentic and fast-paced, Night Terrors is a thrilling plunge into the mind of an obsessed killer. Palumbo draws on his vast knowledge as a licensed psychotherapist to bring his characters into focus, and his success as a Hollywood screenwriter to bring his story to a satisfying, climactic end. This is something you don’t want to miss!”

  —Stephen Jay Schwartz

  LA Times bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat

  “In Night Terrors, Dennis Palumbo takes a brilliant premise and turns it into the kind of thriller most of us wish we could write. Thrills, surprises, and memorable characters. A terrific book.”

  —Timothy Hallinan, Edgar-nominated author

  of the Poke Rafferty and Junior Bender thrillers

  “Night Terrors sends forensic psychologist Daniel Rinaldi on another thrilling, risky ride through the Pittsburgh area’s crazies and-not-so-crazies. A brilliant, gripping emotional journey, full of the great characters and satisfying, unexpected turns we’ve come to expect from author/shrink Dennis Palumbo.”

  —Thomas B. Sawyer, author of the bestselling thrillers

  The Sixteenth Man and No Place To Run

  “Dennis Palumbo is a master of character, psychology, and setting; and Night Terrors showcases these skills to great effect. Highly recommended!”

  —John Lescroart, NYT best-selling author of The Ophelia Cut

  “Another terrific ride from Dennis Palumbo’s Daniel Rinaldi series. A page-turner of the first order. I’m looking forward to the next one.”

  —Bobby Moresco, Oscar-winning writer/producer

  of Crash and Million Dollar Baby

  “Each time Dennis Palumbo returns to the world of psychotherapist Daniel Rinaldi and his colleagues in Pittsburgh law enforcement, his narrative is surer and his understanding deeper. Don’t miss Night Terrors. It’s his best yet.”

  —Thomas Perry, Edgar-winning and

  NYT best-selling author

  “From the discovery of a truncated corpse in a deserted West Virginia farmhouse in the dead of winter to a breathless shootout in an abandoned Pennsylvania steel mill, the suspense never lets up in this new addition to the Daniel Rinaldi series. Author Palumbo uses both parts of his psychologist-crime writer hyphenate to a create a thriller that nearly kills his hero while giving the minds of his readers several playful twists.”

  —Dick Lochte, LA Times bestselling author of

  Sleeping Dog and Blues In the Night

  Night Terrors

  A Daniel Rinaldi Mystery

  Dennis Palumbo

  www.DennisPalumbo.com

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Palumbo

  First E-book Edition 2013

  ISBN: 9781615954445 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  [email protected]

  Contents

  Praise for Night Terrors

  Night Terrors

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  Once again, for Lynne and Daniel

  Acknowledgments

  The author thanks the following people for their continued help and support:

  Ken Atchity, friend and literary manager;

  Annette Rogers, my editor at Poisoned Pen Press and an ongoing source of guidance, perspective, and good humor;

  Robert Rosenwald and Barbara Peters, founders of Poisoned Pen Press, for both their editorial insights and zeal in promoting mysteries;

  Jessica Tribble, publisher extraordinaire, who is defined in Webster’s Dictionary under “Indispensable”;

  Nan Beams, Elizabeth Weld, and Suzan Baroni, also at Poisoned Pen, for their enthusiasm and unswerving attention to detail;

  And, as always, my long-suffering friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention, but with special appreciation to Hoyt Hilsman, Bobby Moresco, Norm Stephens, Richard Stayton, Rick Setlowe, Bob Masello, Garry Shandling, Jim Denova, Michael Harbadin, Claudia Sloan, Dave Congalton, Charlotte Alexander, Mark Evanier, Bob Corn-Revere, Lolita Sapriel, Mark Baker, Mark Schorr, Bill Shick, Thomas B. Sawyer, Fred Golan, Dick Lochte, Al Abramson, Rich Simon, Bill O’Hanlon, Sandy Tolan, Stephen Jay Schwartz, and Dr. Robert Stolorow.

  Epigraph

  I came into the Unknown, beyond all science.

  —St. John of the Cross

  Chapter One

  The killer and I sat together in the back seat of the late-model Range Rover, our shoulders just touching.

  Wesley Currim, early twenties, in jeans and a faded “Beer Me” sweatshirt, shifted uneasily next to me, rubbing his cuffed hands between his knees. His face, profiled in the half-light glazing the snow-encrusted windows, was narrow, acne-pitted. Hard-planed as though etched with acid. His bony frame—so slender he seemed swallowed up by the threadbare County parka—practically vibrated with banked anger.

  I turned away from him to stare out my own side window, out at the grey blur of blowing snow beating sideways against the car, as though propelled by a rage
of its own. Beyond that relentless swirl of dirty white flakes clinging wetly to the window glass, stretched the darkly-forested, isolated landscape of rural West Virgina. Far from the interstate and highways, from the lights of the beleaguered small towns and gasping, dying farms.

  I shivered in my own fleece-lined parka and gloves. My hurried summons down here from Pittsburgh—the desperate phone call from Detective Chief Avery Block, the nerve-twisting drive through a rattling storm to Wheeling PD headquarters, then over just-plowed county roads to the main lock-up to meet Wes Currim himself—all this urgent, headlong momentum had left me little time to think about what it was I’d actually agreed to. And why.

  I glanced then at the two officers in the front seat. Or, to be more precise, at the backs of their heads. Though the temperature was just above freezing outside, the dashboard heater was pumping waves of thick, airless heat into the cramped forward area, and both men were sweating. Dark drops beaded the clean lines of their regulation haircuts along the backs of their necks.

  The older of the two, in the passenger seat, was Chief Avery Block, far past middle-aged, balding, thick-waisted. Furiously chewing his ever-present nicotine gum. When he spoke, which was rarely, it was more like a grunt. The labored effort of a beaten, disillusioned small town cop for whom things hadn’t exactly worked out as planned. And who no longer cared who knew it.

  In the driver’s seat sat Detective Sergeant Harve Randall, barely thirty, lean and wiry, gloved hands tapping anxiously on the wheel as he peered through the storm-blurred windshield. Dark sleeves of snow were pushed to the side by noisy wipers, only to be replaced by fresh clumps.

  “This your first visit to West Virginia, Doc?”

  Randall asked me this without taking his gaze from the windshield. His boss, with an obvious cough, turned to look at him through weary, rheumy eyes. Chewing slower now.

  “Yes it is, Sergeant.” I was their guest, so I went with polite. “Too bad about the storm, though. Looks like nice, wide-open country. Wish I could see more of it.”

  I watched the back of his head bob.

  “Almost Heaven. Like the song says.”

  Chief Block pulled the exhausted wad of gum from his teeth, pinched it between gloved fingers. Stuck it up on the window visor, with its gooey brethren.

  “You just keep your eyes peeled for that turnoff, Sergeant. Okay?”

  Another head bob. “Yes, sir.”

  It was then that Wes Currim spoke. For the first time since we’d all climbed into the Range Rover back in Wheeling, shoulders hunched against the punishing storm, and then to head south through the back woods.

  For the first time in an hour.

  “Turnoff should be just ahead, up on your right there, Harve.”

  I could see Randall’s hands tighten on the wheel.

  “That’s Sergeant Randall to you, douche bag.”

  Currim gave a low, dark chuckle. As if in response to some private joke in his mind.

  I looked over at him again, and he swiveled his head to meet my gaze. A slow, deliberate movement. Like a clockwork person in a dream.

  Yet his eyes were moist, bright, agitated. As though straining to convey either assured bemusement or callous disregard. A ploy betrayed by his thin, twitching fingers.

  Of course, I knew this could just be my own mind, telling stories. A product of the numbing cold, the snow, the wind-whipped moonscape outside. Of the strange, sad journey we were on.

  I’d no sooner had that thought than the Range Rover tipped and tilted over a hard snow rut, as Sgt. Randall wheeled to the right onto a barely-visible back road.

  The vehicle’s engine roared in protest, and, as we lumbered down the winding road, crisscrossed with deep furrows, whatever remained of the shocks noisily gave up the ghost.

  Randall struggled to maintain control of the wheel.

  “Just metal on metal under us now, Chief. And that transmission’s about to go, too.”

  “You just get us there, Harve. In one fuckin’ piece, if you don’t mind.” Chief Block pushed another stick of nicotine gum into his jowled, reddened cheeks.

  Wes Currim stirred again, straining to look past the chief’s shoulder at the road up ahead. All I could see when I did the same was more goddam snow. Flying out of the gloom to be illuminated for a fleeting moment by the car’s powerful headlights, only to disappear again.

  “Almost there, gentlemen.” Currim grinned with serene satisfaction. “End o’ the road.”

  “For you it is, Currim.” Chief Block turned then, eyes black as the coal they pull from the unforgiving earth all around us. “No matter what, it’s the end of the road for your sorry ass.”

  Currim shrugged. “Don’t see why you gotta be so nasty all the time, Chief. I swear, you oughtta give up on that gum and go back to the smokes.”

  Block just stared at him, chewing deliberately, and said not a word. Then he turned and faced front again.

  With another shrug, Wes leaned back in his seat.

  “Nice havin’ you along, though, Doc. Elevates the company, if ya know what I mean.”

  “It’s not like I had any choice.”

  My voice was flat. I could feel the fatigue, the strain of the past hours. The loss of a full night’s sleep.

  “Price o’ fame, Doctor Rinaldi. You oughtta be used to it by now.”

  Sergeant Randall spoke up. “You keep your mouth shut, Wes, or I’ll shut it for you. Now how much farther, you worthless piece o’ shit?”

  “Figure another mile or so, Harve.” Currim clucked his tongue. “Though I ain’t exactly thrilled with the treatment I’m gettin’ here from the department. Especially since I’m cooperatin’ an’ all.” Another glance at me. “Ain’t I, Doc?”

  I didn’t answer. I knew what my job was at the moment: shut up and let Wesley be Wesley, whatever the hell that was. No pressing him about the crime, no attempts at connection or clinical intimacy to ferret out the gruesome details.

  There was no need. He was going to tell us. Show us. As long as we went along with his little game.

  Not twenty-four hours before, in a small interrogation room at police headquarters in Wheeling, Wes Currim had confessed—after declining legal counsel—to the murder of Edward Meachem, a businessman whose family had reported him missing the week before.

  Following the confession, Currim asked to meet with the city’s interim district attorney. He told her he’d be willing to take the police to where Meachem’s body was.

  “As a gesture to his family,” Wes had reportedly said, “so they can have that…dammit, whatja call it?…that closure thing.”

  But Currim had one condition, one request that had to be honored before he’d show the authorities where he’d left the body.

  “I want that shrink that was on the news last year to come with me. Works with the Pittsburgh cops. I need him to help keep me from wiggin’ out, from the shock or whatever.”

  Apparently, the DA knew who he was talking about.

  “You mean Daniel Rinaldi? The psychologist?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. I want Rinaldi to come with me when I show you where I left the poor bastard. And you better get him to do it. Or else I don’t show you shit.”

  Chapter Two

  An hour before Chief Block called me, before I’d ever even heard of Wes Currim, I was in my therapy office on Forbes Avenue in Oakland, overlooking the Pitt campus. My last patient gone for the day, I was standing at my window, peering down through the gloom of early evening. Through the glistening white veil of the latest storm.

  New snow lay thick as frosting over the parked cars, the roofs of restaurants, the bare-branched tops of trees. It piled in deep ruts, in exhaust-blackened furrows carved by the tires of salt-pitted trucks and delivery vans. By buses full of seniors and students and civil servants. By taxis gamely heading for the airport, and car-poo
ling SUVs carrying weary commuters home from work.

  And as swiftly and relentlessly as the snow fell, that’s how slowly and torturously the traffic moved.

  Watching from my window five floors above, I felt the residual emotions from my last patient’s difficult session ease out of my body, to be replaced by a sobering image of myself in my reconditioned ’65 Mustang, joining the slow-moving parade of traffic below. Making the long crawl across the Fort Pitt Bridge, and then up the recently-plowed roads to Mt. Washington. And home.

  I sat down at my marble-topped desk. What I needed was a drink. Jack Daniels, preferably. Instead, what I had in my bottom desk drawer was two plastic bottles of Arrowhead water, a jar of instant coffee, a Snickers bar, and some aspirin.

  Despite myself, I couldn’t get that last session out of my mind. The patient was a young woman, Sophie Teasdale, a sophomore at Carlow College who’d been viciously raped behind a bar on the newly-gentrified South Side.

  The assault had happened six months ago, but she’d only recently had the courage to report it to the police. An arrest was made, a court date for the perpetrator was on the books. After which, the wheels of law enforcement turned, the old gears clicked, and the machinery of justice moved on to the next crime, the next victim.

  Except this particular victim was still traumatized by her brutal experience, showing the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, depression, and frequent recurrent nightmares, as well as a heightened sensitivity to the possibility of future dangers.

  So, as is part of my arrangement with the Pittsburgh Police, Angela Villanova, their chief community liaison officer, sent the young woman to me.

  People like Sophie Teasdale are my specialty. I’m a clinical psychologist, specializing in treating the victims of violent crime. People who may have survived physically, but whose psyches were so damaged as a result of their horrific experience that they needed help.

  Help coping with their fears, nightmares, profound feelings of powerlessness; even, for some, their shame, the belief that they perhaps deserved what happened to them. Or that they could’ve done something to prevent it.