It had entered the wide warehouselike space that Marshall used to display his artwork and took a few moments to peruse the collection, moving from room to room, curious about the individual it had been sent to kill.
The sculptures were strange, twisted things, the wood from which they were made warped and pulled into shapes it was never meant to take, and for a moment the creature wondered if its prey had somehow sensed he was being pursued. Was he right now waiting for it in the darkness above?
For a moment its pulse quickened, the thought of a worthy adversary after all these years filling it with excitement, but then it realized how unlikely such a scenario was and it brought itself back under control. No, its quarry didn’t know it was coming; they never did. The Master might remember the events of that night in the distant past, but those he enacted his vengeance against never did.
This time would be no different.
It had wondered about that before, why the knowledge had been lost, why the threat was no longer guarded against, but the answers to those particular questions were beyond its grasp. Not that it minded; as it was, the situation allowed it to carry out its own plans without fear of discovery or reprisal. The Master was too wrapped up in his own efforts at escape, and his victims were too stupid to see what was happening right before their very eyes.
Which was just fine as it provided the opportunity it needed for its own schemes.
On the other side of the room was a spiral staircase that led to the living space on the floor above. The sound of a television drifted down from above; the creature used the noise to mask its approach.
When it was in position near the staircase, it reached out and gently pushed one of the nearby sculptures off its pedestal.
The resulting crash couldn’t be ignored, and when the television was snapped off and footsteps sounded on the floor above, it congratulated itself on its planning. A light went on at the top of the steps, illuminating the staircase and a thin stretch of the first floor in front of it, though it didn’t reveal the unwanted visitor hiding just beyond. Marshall’s voice floated down into the darkness to where the creature hid, waiting.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
The pitch of his voice was higher than usual, evidence of the fear that coursed through his system at the thought of an intrusion in the middle of the night, and the creature lying in wait smiled in recognition of the sound. It flicked its tongue out into the darkness, like a snake testing the air, and its grin grew wider at the peculiar flavor that met its unnatural senses.
Fear has such a delightful taste, it thought to itself, sharp and pungent, with a unique aroma all its own. It should know; it had spent the last two hundred years inspiring it in more victims than it cared to count, and it knew all its varieties and variations.
“I said, who’s there?” Marshall called again.
When he received no reply after several moments, he tried a different tact.
“I’m warning you,” he said into the darkness, this time with a bit more force but even less conviction. “I’ve got a gun and I’m going to call the cops if you don’t get out of here right now!”
It nearly laughed at the man’s bravado, but it knew that doing so would ruin all its fun, so instead it stepped into the thin slash of light that splayed across the floor in front of the staircase, revealing itself, a seductive smile already set on its beautiful, stolen face.
“Gina!” Marshall exclaimed. “You startled me.”
It could hear the relief in his voice, could see him visibly relax now that he recognized that his mysterious visitor wasn’t a threat.
Fool, it thought.
It was almost too easy.
“Did you forget something?” Marshall asked.
It didn’t say anything, just looked up at the man standing on the steps above it with hunger in its eyes, hunger it didn’t need to fake, and let the body it had assumed do the rest of the work. It wasn’t difficult; a certain quirk to the mouth, a certain pose, and the man above knew exactly why his girlfriend had unexpectedly shown up in the middle of the night.
Marshall laughed and just like that his fear fled, replaced just as quickly by excitement and lust.
“You could have called, you know.”
“Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise,” it said, and its voice was a perfect copy of the rich contralto of the woman whose body it wore.
The smile still on its face, it climbed the stairs toward its unsuspecting prey.
Later, when it was finished, when what it had come to collect was safely stored and ready for delivery, when the body had been posed appropriately and the markings left scrawled haphazardly across the walls as they had been at the last scene, it withdrew another small figurine from its pocket and flicked it across the room. The charm bounced a few times before coming to rest on the far side of the bedroom, near one wall.
As before, the charm was not in the Master’s plan; he would, in fact, be furious if he ever found out about them.
The risk was worth it, however.
This time Hunt wouldn’t be able to ignore the obvious. And when he made the proper connections between the current events and those that happened five years ago, he wouldn’t quit until he had chased the clues back to their source.
And, at long last, it would be free.
Satisfied, it resumed the form it had used when entering the gallery two hours before and left the scene as swiftly and as quietly as it had come.
17
THEN
I thought the first month was bad, but it wasn’t even worth comparing to the endless weeks of fear and anxiety that followed. Every time I heard the doorbell I was convinced the police would be waiting on the doorstep with terrible news. Every time the phone rang I imagined a flat, lifeless voice telling me that they had found my daughter’s body and were going to ask me to come down to the station to make an identification. Each time I was wrong my anxiety level went up a notch because the possibility still remained. What I’d imagined could still come true.
It wasn’t any way to live a life.
Eventually, I stopped trusting the police to do their job and began to look into things on my own. I went through the police reports, examined the interview files, double-checking every detail. I chased down every lead no matter how inconsequential, looking at everything they had already been through and then some.
When I couldn’t stare at the computer screen any longer, I took to the streets, driving the neighborhoods, searching the back roads and alleys looking for my daughter. The chances of finding her this way were so remote as to be astronomical, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
Whenever I grew tired I reminded myself that my little girl was out there somewhere, lost and afraid, and that it was up to me to find her and bring her home. Whenever I wanted to throw up my hands and give up, I thought of her smiling face and pushed myself that much harder because of it. I wouldn’t rest until she came home, I told myself over and over again, and slowly but surely the search began to take over my life.
I didn’t realize just how much until that day in late March, seventeen months after Elizabeth had vanished.
“I’m leaving.”
I was so engrossed in looking through a stack of notes I’d made over the last several months, odd scraps of paper with nearly indecipherable scribbling about potential sightings and the occasional police alert over some other missing child, that I didn’t even look up when Anne spoke.
“Okay,” I said absently. “When will you be back?”
“I won’t.”
I’m embarrassed now to say that it took several minutes for her reply to filter through to me. When it did, I looked up in confusion to find her standing at the door to my office. Behind her, in the hallway before the front entrance, I could see several suitcases.
“What are you doing?” I sputtered, half-rising out of my seat. “Where are you going?”
She looked at me calmly. “I’m leaving, Jeremiah. For good.”
I didn’t understand. “But you can’t leave,” I said, gesturing vaguely back at the computer screen and the stacks of file folders on my desk. “We’ve got to find Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth is dead.”
Her tone was flat, cold.
“What?!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It had only been a little more than a year since we’d lost our daughter. I knew there were plenty of cases on record where kids had been found years after their disappearance. Shawn Hornbeck. Natascha Kampusch. Elizabeth Smart. There was still hope.
There was always hope.
Apparently Anne didn’t think so. “Elizabeth is dead, Jeremiah. Probably has been for a long time.”
I stiffened and felt my anger flare. “Don’t say that!”
“It’s the truth.”
“No, it’s not. She’s out there. I know she is!” I was practically spitting with sudden, unrelenting rage.
Anne sighed and looked away for a moment. When she turned back, I expected to see tears in her eyes, but there weren’t any. She’d burned through her sorrow long ago. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed.
Her voice was calm, level.
“Look at yourself. You haven’t changed your clothes in more than a week.”
Confused, I glanced down. I had a vague memory of getting dressed, but I couldn’t be sure if that was earlier that morning or earlier that week. The proliferation of coffee stains on my shirt suggested the latter, though even that wasn’t a reliable indicator. I drank a lot of coffee.
“You stink. Literally. I can’t even remember the last time you had a shower.”
For that matter, neither could I, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.
“I’m getting close, Anne, I know it,” I said, my eyes straying back toward the pile of paper, torn between dealing with her sudden announcement and losing my train of thought. “She’s out there and I’m going to find her.”
She shook her head. “No, you won’t. You’re a mess, Jeremiah, and every day it gets worse. You’re obsessed and it’s killing you. Killing us.”
“So you’re just going to walk away, is that it? Forget Elizabeth? Forget us?”
I’d meant it to hurt, but she didn’t even flinch.
“I’m not forgetting anything, Jeremiah. It’s you who’s forgotten. Forgotten that there is more to life than staring at photos of missing children and scouring police reports. Forgotten that there is a time to grieve and a time to move on with your life. Forgotten us.”
That last part was said with more than a hint of longing, but I was too far gone in my self-inflicted madness to even notice. Maybe if I had, things would have turned out differently. Maybe she would have stayed and the collision course I was headed toward could have been averted. I’ll never know, because I did the one thing I shouldn’t have.
I got defensive.
“Oh, so suddenly I’m to blame for all this, huh? Why don’t you just say what you really mean, Anne? You’ve been dying to say it for over a year now, so have the balls to just put it out there on the table instead of hiding behind all this bullshit. Go on, say it. It’s my fault Elizabeth disappeared, right? Right?”
It was stupid. I know that now. But at the time all I could hear was my conscience screaming the same thing it had been screaming every single minute of every single day since Elizabeth had disappeared: it’s your fault.
Anne stared at me for a while without saying anything. Then, in a soft voice, she said, “Get help, Jeremiah. Get help before it’s too late.”
Without another word, she turned, picked up her suitcases, and walked out of my life.
18
NOW
I’d shed my anxiety and self-pity by the time I reached home. After undressing, I flopped onto my bed and quickly fell asleep. To my amazement, it was the first night in a long while that I slept restfully. Apparently I’d needed it, too, for I didn’t wake until midmorning the next day. After a cup of coffee and a bagel, I went back to work trying to translate the writing on the crime scene walls.
Stanton called just before noon.
“Well? What have you got for me?” he asked.
I ignored the impatience in his tone and tried to give him a decent summary of what I’d achieved. Which, when you got right down to it, wasn’t all that much.
He wasn’t fooled.
“Come on, Hunt? That’s the best you’ve got? I thought you were supposed to be an expert on this stuff?”
“I’m working on it, Stanton. I just need a bit more time.”
He grunted. “Time’s not something we’ve got a whole helluva lot of, Hunt. Step it up. I need some answers!”
Asshole, I thought, as he hung up without saying anything more. I was working as hard as I could, for heaven’s sake!
But his call did what it was more than likely intended to do—guilt me into working harder than I had been doing. Now that I had copied all the symbols onto paper, I could work at my own pace and without any ghostly assistance by simply doing so in the dark. I couldn’t see photographs or paintings, but my own drawings were no problem for me. I spent the next four hours trying every type of code I knew of and then some. Substitution codes. Transposition codes. Numeric ciphers. Multiletter ciphers. You name it, I tried it, until my journal was full of my scribbling and false starts.
And I still came up empty.
Eventually my head hurt so much that I wandered into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa, intent on taking a short nap before getting back at it.
A loud buzzing woke me from a dream of being chased though endless corridors by six-foot-tall hieroglyphs with arms that threatened to squeeze me to death. I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that my failure to translate the markings on the walls of Brenda Connolly’s bedroom had gotten under my skin and made me more than a bit exasperated.
The sound was the audible alarm I’d installed at my gate to let me know when someone was waiting outside. I stumbled tiredly over to the wall control and hit the talk button.
“This had better be good,” I said, without the slightest sense of humor.
“Shut up and unlock the gate, Hunt.”
Stanton. Great. To what did I owe this dubious honor? I thought.
Throwing on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, I walked to the end of the drive, unlocked the gate, and let him follow me back up to the house. I returned to the kitchen for a much-needed cup of coffee.
I heard him come into the room just as I opened the cupboard.
“What happened?” I said over my shoulder as I got a mug out and reached for the coffeepot. I’d set it to brew a new pot shortly after lunch, which meant it was several hours old, but coffee was coffee, and with the afternoon I’d had so far I needed a cup to jump-start the system. “Wife throw you out?”
Stanton was too busy fumbling around in the dark and cursing beneath his breath to respond to my jibe. I chuckled at seeing him out of his element.
He wasn’t amused.
“Christ, Hunt! I know you’re blind, but can’t you at least turn on some lights for your guests?” he asked.
I was opening my mouth to toss a witty reply in his direction about not having invited any guests when he apparently found the light switch on his own.
Blazing white light flooded the room, drowning out my sight. I flinched at the sudden assault on my unprotected eyes, squeezing them shut to avoid the blinding brightness, and managed to pour the coffee that was intended for the inside of my coffee mug all over my hand.
Now it was my turn to curse.
He ignored my outburst, and the spilled coffee. “Get dressed,” he said.
“Why? We going somewhere?” I asked, as I fumbled my way to the sink and shoved my hand under cold water.
“Back Bay. We’ve got another body.”
Shit.
Any thought I’d had of eating went right out the window. Blind or not, a murder scene on a full stomach was not something I wanted to experience. “Let me change my sh
irt and throw on some shoes,” I said wearily.
Stanton drove. I sat in the passenger seat of his department-issue Crown Vic, letting the sun shine on my face through the window and trying to dispel the lingering sense of discomfort a visit to a crime scene always brought with it. I wondered what we were going to find this time.
Apparently, Stanton was learning how to read my thoughts.
“Guy’s name is Marshall. James Marshall. Makes custom wood furniture, sculptures, shit like that. Has a gallery and loft apartment on Newbury Street.”
Known to some as America’s Most Desirable Neighborhood, Back Bay stretches from the Charles River to the Mass Turnpike and contains cultural landmarks like Copley Square and the John Hancock Tower. It was best known for its expensive shopping and housing areas. Having a house there was seen as a certain measure of social status. If you lived in Back Bay, you had made it.
‘Shit like that’ must pay pretty damn well, I thought, as Stanton went on.
“Marshall’s gallery manager got worried when she couldn’t reach him this morning. Finally asked the building super to go in and take a look.” Stanton chuckled. “Gotta give those guys credit. Sometimes I think they find more bodies than we do,” he said, as he swerved around a corner.
There are certain situations where I am perfectly happy being blind. Driving with Stanton is one of them. I had my feet braced against the floor and a death grip on the doorjamb, and I still bounced in different directions as we swept down the street. Stanton used the siren multiple times to clear the way ahead, never once slowing down but simply trusting that the other drivers would get the hell out of his way, and I suspect we had more than our fair share of close calls. Having to look out the windshield and watch it all happening probably would have made me nauseous.
Eventually we arrived at our destination, and as I thankfully got out of his car and put my feet back on solid ground, I realized that there was a crowd gathered in front of Marshall’s brownstone.
Eyes to See Page 9
