But sometime during the cold Chicago winter something apparently changed. On March 13—which would have been the thirteenth birthday celebrated by the Smathers boy—Mr. Brooks sat in his favorite chair in the den where he liked to write poems as a distraction from his job as a homicide detective. He’d taken at least two tablets of Percocet he had left over from treatment of a back injury the year before. He wrote a single line in his poetry notebook. Then he put the barrel of his .38 Special into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his wife when she came home from work.
The death of Mr. Brooks left family and friends bereaved and full of questions. What could they have done? What were the signs they had missed? Cantor shook his head wistfully when asked during an interview if there were answers for these troubling questions.
“The mind is a funny, unpredictable and sometimes terrible thing,” the soft-spoken psychologist said in his office. “I thought that John had come very far with me. But, obviously, we did not come far enough.” Mr. Brooks and whatever it was that haunted him remain an enigma. Even his last message is a puzzle. The line he wrote on the pad offered little in the way of insight into what caused him to turn his gun on himself.
“Through the pale door,” were his last written words. The line was not original. Mr. Brooks borrowed it from Edgar Allan Poe. In his poem “The Haunted Palace,” which originally appeared in one of Poe’s best-known stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe wrote:
While like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh—but smile no more.
The meaning of those words to Mr. Brooks is unclear but they certainly carry the melancholy incumbent in his final act.
Meantime, the murder of Bobby Smathers remains an open case. In the homicide unit where Mr. Brooks worked and his colleagues still pursue the case, the detectives now say they are seeking justice for two victims.
“Far as I’m concerned, this is a double murder,” said Lawrence Washington, a detective who grew up with Brooks and was partnered with him in the homicide unit. “Whoever did the boy also did Jumpin’ John. You can’t convince me any different.”
I straightened up and glanced around the newsroom. No one was looking at me. I looked back down at the printout and read the end of the story again. I was stunned, almost to the same degree as the night Wexler and St. Louis had come for me. I could hear my heart beating, my guts being taken in a cold and crushing grip. I couldn’t read anything else but the name of the story. Usher. I had read it in high school and again in college. I knew the story. And I knew the character of the title. Roderick Usher. I opened my notebook and looked at the few notes I had jotted down after leaving Wexler the day before. The name was there. Sean had written it in the chronological record. It was his last entry.
RUSHER
After dialing the editorial library I asked for Laurie Prine.
“Laurie, it’s—”
“Jack. Yes, I know.”
“Look, I need an emergency search. I mean, I think it’s a search. I’m not sure how to get—”
“What is it, Jack?”
“Edgar Allan Poe. Do we have anything on him?”
“Sure. I’m sure we have lots of biographical abstracts. I could—”
“I mean do we have any of his short stories or works? I’m looking for ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ And sorry to interrupt.”
“That’s okay. Um, I don’t know what we would have right here as far as his written works go. Like I said, it’s mostly biographical. I can take a look. But, I mean, any bookstore around here is going to sell his stuff if we don’t have it.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll just go over to the Tattered Cover.”
I was about to put the phone down when she said my name.
“Yes?”
“I just thought of something. Like if you want to quote a line or something, we have lots of quotations on CD-ROM. I could just plug it in real quick.”
“Okay. Do it.”
She put the phone down for an eternity. I reread the end of the Times story again. What I was thinking seemed like a long shot but the coincidences in the way my brother and Brooks had died and in the names of Roderick Usher and RUSHER could not be ignored.
“Okay, Jack,” Laurie said after picking back up. “I just checked our indexes. We have no books containing Poe’s works in whole. I’ve got the poetry disk in, so let’s give it a whirl. What do you want?”
“There is a poem called ‘The Haunted Palace’ that is part of the story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ Can you get that?”
She didn’t answer. I heard her typing on the computer.
“Okay, yeah, there are selected quotes from the story and the poem. Three screens.”
“Okay, is there a line that goes ‘Out of space, out of time’?”
“Out of space. Out of time.”
“Right. I don’t know the punctuation.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She was typing.
“Uh, no. It’s not in—”
“Damn!”
I don’t know why I made such an outburst. It immediately bothered me.
“But, Jack, it is a line from another poem.”
“What? By Poe?”
“Yes. It’s in a poem called ‘Dream-Land.’ You want me to read it? The whole stanza’s here.”
“Read it.”
“Okay, I’m not that great at reading poetry but here goes. ‘By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly, / From an ultimate dim Thule— / From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE—out of TIME.’ That’s it. But there is an editor’s note. It says an Eidolon means a phantom.”
I didn’t say anything. I was frozen still.
“Jack?”
“Read it again. Slower, this time.”
I wrote the stanza in my notebook. I could have just asked her to print it out and then gone and picked it up but I didn’t want to move. I wanted, for the short moment, to be totally alone with this. I had to be.
“Jack, what is it?” she asked when she was done reading. “You seem so anxious about this.”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve gotta go.”
I hung up.
In an instant I began to feel overly warm, claustrophobic. As large as the newsroom was, I felt like the walls were closing in. My heart pounded. A vision of my brother in the car flashed through my mind.
Glenn was on the phone when I walked into his office and sat down in front of him. He pointed to the door and nodded like he wanted me to wait outside until he was done. I didn’t move. He pointed again and I shook my head.
“Listen, I’ve got something happening here,” he said into the phone. “Can I call you back? Great. Yeah.”
He hung up.
“What’s—”
“I need to go to Chicago,” I said. “Today. And then probably to Washington, then maybe Quantico, Virginia. To the FBI.”
Glenn didn’t buy it.