Текст книги "Touching evil"

Автор книги: Kay Hooper

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Maggie looked around the room. John was on the phone, jotting down notes on a legal pad. Jennifer, Andy, and Quentin were bent over a map spread out on the table, carefully marking locations from possibilities on the list.

Maggie looked at the list, then laid it down atop her sketch pad. There was only one waterfront location remote enough to provide the privacy and secrecy he needed. She should tell them. She knew that. There was really no excuse not to tell them.

Her car was here at the station, John had driven her back there to get it this morning, both of them surprised to find the car not only intact but apparently untouched, her sketch pad safely inside, and she had driven it here, where it was more likely to remain safe.

She got up and went to pour herself some coffee, having already noticed the pot was empty. Picking it up with a shrug, she left the conference room, ostensibly to get more water.

On her way out of the station, she left the pot on top of somebody’s filing cabinet.

“Well,” Jennifer said, staring down at the map, now marked with numerous little red flags, “if we eliminate all the places that aren’t remote or isolated enough for his… needs… we end up with six possibles. All warehouses or storage facilities of some kind.”

John joined them and said, “Only three of the addresses on this list are no longer in use, at least according to my sources.” He bent over the map and pointed them out. “Here. These three. Supposedly either empty or storing bits of equipment and machinery forgotten long ago.”

Quentin frowned at the map. “Two warehouses and one storage building. But only the two warehouses are remote enough to satisfy his requirements, I’d guess, and they’re miles apart.”

“So which one do we check first?” Jennifer asked.

Before anyone could offer a suggestion, Scott spoke from the doorway, his voice strained. “Where’s Maggie?”

John looked around swiftly, realizing only then that she had been out of the room far too long. “She’s…” He steadied his voice, something in Scott’s face sending cold fear through him. “She went to get more water for coffee, I think. Why?”

“I found the file on the last victim from 1934.”

Quentin was frowning at him. “And?”

Scott opened the folder he carried and silently held up a photo all of them could see clearly. All too clearly.

The last woman killed in 1934 could have been Maggie’s twin.

“Christ,” John breathed. And he knew, even before they looked for her, that Maggie was no longer in the building, that she knew or guessed where Simon would be and had slipped away to face him.

Responsibility. Atonement.

“She’s gone after him,” he told the others, hearing the hoarse fear in his own voice.

“Alone?” Andy stared at him. “In Christ’s name, why?”

John shook his head, unable to even begin to explain any of it right now. “Just-trust me. That’s where she’s gone.”

Quentin didn’t waste time with questions, just said, “She hasn’t got much of a head start on us, but if we’re to catch up to her in time we’ll have to split up to check both warehouses.”

“No S.W.A.T team,” John said immediately, repeating Andy’s earlier statement. “If a bunch of cops show up and she’s there, he could-” He couldn’t even finish the thought.

Quentin said, “I agree.”

Andy groaned. “Shit.”

“Do you trust anybody else to go in, with Maggie in the line of fire?” Quentin asked him.

“No. Dammit.”

“Then it’s us. John, are you armed?”

“In my car.”

Andy scowled at him. “Goddammit, John.”

John shrugged into his jacket. “Don’t worry, Andy, I have a permit to carry. And I’m a good shot.”

“Listen to me. If you shoot the man who killed your sister, there’ll be a lot of sympathy, but-”

“If I shoot him, it’ll be because I have absolutely no other choice. It won’t be for revenge. Trust me on that.” He looked at Andy steadily.

“Shit. Okay, Jenn and Scott will come with me.” He stared at the map, at the two remaining flags. “Want to flip a coin?”

Quentin studied the map for only an instant. “John and I’ll take the waterfront warehouse.”

Andy looked at him. “Because of Joey?”

“Yeah. Because of Joey.”

“Let’s go,” John said.

It didn’t occur to Maggie until she got there that the warehouse might have been wired for security. But as she approached the place on foot after leaving her car nearly a hundred yards back along the rutted road, she also realized that he would have done nothing to draw undue attention here. The isolation alone would protect him, that and the fence Maggie had scaled just after parking her car.

It was still a gray, dreary day, cold, not raining but almost, and nothing dry crackled under her foot to give away her approach. The warehouse she neared was a huge, hulking old building, part concrete and part rotting timbers, with a slate roof and very few windows. Maggie found the door easily enough but paused with her hand on it, her eyes closing briefly.

Useless not to admit she was terrified. Because he was in there. And because there might be a dying or dead woman in there with him, a woman Maggie wanted desperately to save if she could. If she could.

What she couldn’t do was open the door to those inner senses. They could give her an edge-or destroy her. They could help her find him-or kill her with another woman’s mortal injuries long before he could get his hands on her.

So she did her best to keep those inner senses firmly under control, shut deep inside herself and as inactive as she could possibly force them to be. It required almost as much focus and concentration to not use the senses as it did to use them, and she was all too aware that she would not be able to do it indefinitely. A few minutes, maybe.

Maybe.

She drew a deep breath, then slowly pulled the heavy door open. The hinges didn’t creak. Inside was darkness, but as she stepped in and eased the door shut behind her, her eyes quickly adjusted. She could smell old machinery and dust.

And blood.

It stopped her, but only for an instant. She picked her way carefully among splintering crates and looming pieces of rusting equipment, gradually getting a feeling for the size of the place. And seeing, finally, a light in the distance.

She moved toward it cautiously, becoming aware that he had not enclosed the space in which he… worked. Perhaps he was claustrophobic. He had been before, she remembered. Hated enclosed places, just hated them.

When had that been? 1934? At the very beginning, in 1894? She wasn’t sure. Her memories of other lives were only instincts, flickering bits of knowledge, precarious certainties. The universe refused to make it easy for her.

He had picked a warehouse with soaring spaces above and arranged his… working space… within walls made only of old crates and unused equipment in an area near the waterside end of the building. A worktable with various tools and ropes and bottles of unidentifiable liquids. A gurney off to one side, presumably so that he could wheel his victims out to whatever transportation he used.

And in the center of the space…

It looked obscene. A double bed with carved oak head and footboards. And beside it, a chair. A beautifully upholstered, wingback chair. With a footstool.

From her angle, Maggie could see a woman’s wrists raised and tied to each side of the headboard, but she couldn’t see if Tara was alive or dead.

And even with her inner senses closed off, she could feel pain. Pain from this victim and those who had gone before her, distant whispers of agony so acute they had soaked into the very matter of this place, the particles that made it real. Maggie had to stop for a moment and press her hands to her mouth, concentrate on blocking, closing out, holding within.

When she finally opened her eyes again, she saw him.

He had come out of the shadows and was doing something at his worktable, and even from here she could dimly make out a wordless humming, almost a crooning sound. When he turned toward the bed, she saw that he wore a plastic mask, not a horror mask, but one with perfect, smoothly polished features, like those of a statue, white and lifeless. Female features. And the black wig he wore swept down on either side of the white mask, so that he had the creepy look of a mannequin.

She also saw that he was holding a knife.

Maggie took a quick step forward, then froze as a shadowy figure emerged from between two large crates near her, paused only to make a beckoning gesture to Maggie, and then flowed toward the work area. A slender, childlike young woman with a heart-shaped face and delicate features and long, dark hair.

Annie.

“Bobby… Bobby…”

He jerked to a stop, the eerily pretty white face turning quickly.

“Bobby…”

Understanding, Maggie eased her way to one side so that she would be approaching from a different direction and then moved toward him, hoping her own voice wasn’t shaking too badly, and sounded as eerie as Annie when she called out, “Bobby… I’m sorry, Bobby, so sorry. I didn’t mean what I said…” She didn’t know where the words came from. Memory. Instinct.

The knife he held clattered to the stone floor, and he backed up another step, his physical posture one of tension and uneasiness while that white face remained expressionless. He fumbled behind him on the table, then held out a gun in one black-gloved, shaking hand.

Maggie wondered if it was the gun he had used to kill Quentin’s friend Joey.

“Bobby,” Annie murmured sadly, “you hurt me, Bobby. Why did you hurt me?” She glided into the circle of light, facing him. Confronting him. The nightgown she wore was fine linen, and thin, and her feet were bare. “Why did you hurt me, brother?”

He made an odd, harsh sound.

“Bobby,” Maggie called, moving toward them slowly. “Bobby, I didn’t mean it when I said you weren’t a man. I didn’t mean to laugh at you.” She cast a quick glance toward the bed and flinched at the blood-soaked mattress, the pale, thin body that was bruised and battered. The missing eyes.

She couldn’t tell if Tara was dead or alive.

For an instant, her control wavered, and she felt a jolt of pain so intense it nearly doubled her over. Desperately, she struggled to shore up those inner walls, to close out the suffering she couldn’t afford to share this time.

“Bobby.” Annie glided another few steps toward him, holding out her hands beseechingly as she drew his attention away from Maggie. “I’ve been trying to find you, Bobby. I miss you so much…”

He made another choked sound and this time ripped off the mask and wig. Maggie recognized him from the pictures Christina had shown her. He was an ordinary man with brown hair, a high forehead, and pale grayish eyes. Slender but with wide shoulders and those oddly incongruous, outsize hands, their power obvious even gloved. Especially gloved.

But otherwise an ordinary man.

“You’re dead,” he said hoarsely to Annie.

Maggie moved into the light. “We’re both dead, Bobby. You killed us. You killed us a long time ago.” She was terrified she was wrong about this. Terrified of not being strong enough to destroy his evil. Terrified of dying.

He swallowed hard, staring at her now. “Deanna… I killed you. Why won’t you stay dead?” His voice cracked. “Why in hell’s name won’t you stay dead?”

Annie uttered a sweet laugh. “We’re stronger than you, Bobby. We always have been. Didn’t you know that?”

Shattering the quiet, he fired two times directly at her.

The bullets hit the crate behind her, splintering wood. She smiled at him. “We’re stronger, Bobby. We’ll always be stronger.”

“No! I’m stronger! I can kill you! I can kill you all!”

“You didn’t kill me, Bobby,” Hollis said as she stepped out of the shadows a few yards to Maggie’s right.

He let out a sort of wail and backed up until he was up against the worktable and could retreat no farther. “No. No, I can kill you. I did kill you…”

Without planning to, Maggie said, “And it doesn’t do any good to blind us, Bobby. We see you. We always see you.”

“Always,” Hollis echoed as she took another step toward him. Her eyelids were reddened and the marks of the attack were only half healed on her face, but blue eyes gazed at him, clear and steady, and she wore a small, contemptuous smile. “Did you really think you could take my eyes, Bobby?”

“I did,” he muttered. He laughed suddenly, his own eyes gleaming with tears or madness. “I did. I took them. I cut them out. I did. I know I did. I put them in a bowl and watched them float. I took your eyes, Audra. I took-they were brown eyes. I remember that. Brown eyes. And I took them. And you couldn’t see me.”

“I see you now.” Her voice was flat, cold. “I see you, Bobby. We all see you. You’ll never be able to hide from any of us ever again.”

“No,” he mumbled, the gun wavering, his wide shoulders hunching. “No, please.”

“We see you,” Annie repeated.

“We see you,” Maggie echoed.

He laughed-a strange, high sound-and watching him, Maggie saw his eyes change. In those flat gray depths, something was coming apart, disintegrating. She felt a peculiar sensation, as if some force, some energy, had blown past her, pressure more than air, nearly causing her ears to pop.

It all happened within the space of seconds, and then, before she could move or react, that wavering gun pointed at her, steadied, and he whimpered, “No-”

Maggie had a split second to gaze into eyes that now held nothing but a kind of dumb hatred, and then a third shot echoed through the warehouse.

She expected pain, waited for it. But the pistol in Simon Walsh’s hand clattered to the floor, and he crumpled almost soundlessly.

It was over. It was finally over.

Before Maggie could do more than catch her breath, John was there, holding her hard with one arm while the pistol in his free hand remained pointed toward Walsh.

“Maggie-”

“For a minute there,” she heard herself say with astonishing calm, “I thought you were going to be too late.”

“He nearly was,” Quentin commented, moving out of the shadows near where Annie had been. He went to warily check for a pulse in Walsh, keeping his own gun at the ready but relaxing when he found no heartbeat. “I didn’t have a clear shot from my angle, so it was all up to him.”

“Tara-”

But Quentin was already moving toward the bed and seconds later looked at them with grim eyes.

“She’s alive, but just barely.” He took out his cell phone to quickly summon an ambulance, while Hollis joined him at the other side of the bed, helping him to gently untie Tara Jameson’s wrists and murmuring soothingly to the terribly injured woman.

“You two took a hell of a chance,” John said, his voice jerky. “Jesus, Maggie-”

Maggie sent a fleeting glance around, unsurprised to find Annie gone, then smiled up at him. “I know. It was just something I-”

“Felt you had to do. Yeah, I got that.” He flicked the gun’s safety on, then stuck the weapon inside his jacket and put both hands on her shoulders. He didn’t shake her, but the desire to do so was evident in the way his fingers tightened. “Want to tell me how you thought you could win this little confrontation without so much as a big stick?”

She shook her head. “I knew my face gave me an edge, that it would catch him off guard to see me here. It gave me the control, at least for a little while. I thought… maybe the only way to fight his evil would be to shatter it-or at least the mind holding it. To have one of his victims face him, knowing all his secrets. It was the only thing I could think of to do. I had to try, John.”

“Just don’t ever do anything like that to me again.”

“No, I won’t.” She looked at him searchingly.

“I won’t have nightmares about killing him,” John assured her. “And no regrets. When you put a mad dog out of his misery, you’re only doing him a favor.”

“You had no choice,” she said anyway.

“I know.” He pulled her into his arms. “Are you all right? Even I can feel the pain in this place.”

Maggie considered, then smiled at him. “When you touch me, all I feel is you.”

“Good,” John said, and kissed her.

Nearly an hour later, Andy stood outside the warehouse with the others waiting for his forensics team to arrive and said, “So that was what evil looked like. I wasn’t impressed.”

“No,” Maggie said.

He gazed at her with lifted brows. “No?”

“No. That was just the shell evil lived in for a while.”

“You mean because he’s dead now?”

“Because the evil was destroyed this time before the flesh was.”

Andy blinked, looked at John and Quentin, then shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t think I want to know what it was all about.”

“Wise of you,” Quentin murmured.

Scott joined them, saying, “The Caddie is parked in that shed over there. A ‘72, looks like. Just what your friend Joey described, Quentin.”

He smiled faintly. “Yeah, he always did know cars.”

Jennifer asked, “How the hell did Hollis Templeton get here?” Since Hollis had left in the ambulance with Tara Jameson, she asked the question of the others.

Maggie shrugged. “She said… a little voice told her she should be here. So she came. Didn’t say how.”

“Jesus,” Scott said.

Andy looked at him, seemed about to say something, and then obviously thought better of it. He settled his shoulders with the air of a man deciding things.

“Well, as far as we’re concerned, Simon Walsh raped and killed women. He was the Blindfold Rapist.”

“Nobody’s arguing with you, Andy,” Quentin said mildly.

“No?”

“No.”

Andy heaved a sigh. “Good. Now, will somebody please tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to put in my report?”

Quentin grinned at him. “You can try the truth. Of course, the truth is a bit complicated. I mean, what with Maggie and Hollis being here, to say nothing of Annie.”

“Annie?”

“The little voice Hollis heard,” Quentin explained solemnly. “She was here. Well, sort of.”

John looked at him. “So you saw her too?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Good. I was afraid it was just me.”

Andy stared at them both for a moment and, again, very obviously decided he didn’t want to know. They all heard the sounds of sirens approaching, and he groaned. “I’ll either get a medal or get committed.”

“Welcome to my world,” Quentin said.

EPILOGUE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2001

Sitting up in her hospital bed to better talk to her visitors, Kendra said to Hollis, “So Annie was Robert Graham’s twin sister, the first one he killed.”

“Apparently. I’d had her voice in my head since the attack, but it was only the last few days that she told me who she was. And what she needed me to do.”

“I’m glad you were there,” Maggie told her. “I think you were the clincher. Standing there looking at him even though he’d thought he had blinded you for good.”

“I wasn’t sure what I was doing,” Hollis confessed. “Just… saying whatever popped into my head.” She shook her head. “Annie had told me I had to be there, that it was the only way to help you. When she told me that, told me I had to see or else he’d be free to go on killing, I just-all of a sudden I could see. It was easy to distract the cop guarding my door, easy to slip out. And I knew, somehow, where to go.”

“You and Maggie,” Quentin said. He looked at Maggie. “Thanks for sharing.”

“Don’t you give me a hard time,” she warned him with a faint smile. “I’ve already heard enough about it from John. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I knew-or thought I knew. It was just that so much of it was vague or unclear. I was afraid if I said too much I’d cause things to go even more horribly wrong.”

“We’ve been there,” Kendra told her ruefully. “Sometimes we walk a very fine line between what we think we know and what’s actually going on.”

Maggie nodded. “It can be a challenge. I mean, there were flashes of memory or bits of information I wasn’t sure I could trust, but all I really knew absolutely for certain was that I had to be there at the end, confronting him.”

John said, “Because you’d been his wife long ago and weren’t able to stop him from killing.”

Maggie looked at the others with slightly lifted brows. “He’s having a hard time with this.”

“No, I’m not,” John denied. He was stared at politely, and finally sighed. “Okay, I am.”

“He’ll get used to it,” Quentin assured Maggie. “Between us, we’ve nearly worn away that high gloss of logic and rationality he used to wear.”

Hollis looked at John. “Aren’t you grateful?”

“Oh, immensely. The world’s beginning to look almost normal standing on its ear.”

“It’s all about balance,” Maggie murmured.

John took her hand with a determined air and said to the others, “If you’ll excuse us, we have things to discuss.”

“Thanks for the visit,” Kendra said, smiling.

“We’ll be back tomorrow,” Maggie told her.

“I’ll look forward to it.”

As they left the hospital room, they heard Quentin saying to Hollis, “Listen, our boss should be here any minute, and he’s sort of anxious to meet you-”

Maggie said, “Do you think she will? I mean, join Bishop’s unit?”

“You know her better than I do,” John replied. “But from what I’ve seen, I’d say Hollis Templeton is very aware of having a brand-new life stretching in front of her, and I doubt that after this she’ll be eager to… embrace the ordinary.”

“Very poetic.”

“Thank you.”

“And probably true,” Maggie added. “There are certain corners that, having once been turned, change your view of the world forever.”

As the elevator doors closed and the car started downward, John looked at her gravely. “I’ll say.”

She smiled faintly. “You’re seriously considering it, aren’t you? Helping to build some sort of civilian resource organization similar to Bishop’s unit?”

“Quentin’s had worse ideas,” John admitted.

“Admit it-you’re just beginning to enjoy seeing the world standing on its ear, that’s what it is.”

“Well, that’s part of it. And there’s you, of course. You’re not about to stop doing what you do best just because that greater evil got buried this time around. And much as I respect Andy and the other cops, I think we both know that your talents deserve… a broader canvas.”

“So do yours, for that matter,” she said. “Building the kind of organization Quentin was talking about won’t be easy. Lots of strikes against it, beginning with the uneasiness most people feel about psychic ability.”

“Which is why I’m perfect for the job. I know how to build organizations from the ground up, and I’m about as nonpsychic as they come.”

They left the elevator and walked down the bustling hallway toward the doors, and it wasn’t until they were outside in the clear, chill air that Maggie stopped, looked up at him with a smile, and said, “It’s all about balance.”

“So I can say it now?” he asked, smiling but intent.

“You still don’t have to.” She slipped her arms up around his neck as he pulled her close, both of them oblivious to the people walking past them. “We balance perfectly. I love you, John.”

Just before his lips touched hers, John murmured, “That’s all I needed to hear.”