Night Sins

by Tami Hoag

  “Mr. Fletcher? It's Chief Holt,” he said, his voice low and even.

  Fletcher's head snapped around. The railing wobbled. Mitch's body tensed, ready to spring forward. The deacon's eyes were wild, bright with madness.

  “You're right, you know,” Mitch said. “We're onto Father Tom. We're going to arrest him. We'll need you to help us.”

  Fletcher stared at him, pulling the crucifix down to clutch it against his body. “Beware false prophets,” he muttered. “Beware false prophets. Shapen in iniquity. Conceived in sin.”

  “You know about sin, don't you, Albert?” Mitch said, inching toward the railing. “You can tell us all about it. But we'll need you to come to the station. You can be our witness.”

  “Witness,” Fletcher mumbled. He thrust the crucifix skyward again and shouted, “Witness! Witness the wrath of God!”

  The railing groaned. Mitch was moving even as the sickening sound of wood breaking cracked in his ears. He lunged for Fletcher as the balcony railing gave way, catching hold of the deacon's left hand. Momentum yanked him toward the edge. His shoulder slammed into the support column and he wrapped his free arm around it, gritting his teeth against the pain, against the strain of holding Fletcher's weight. A fraction of a second later, the hold was broken and the deacon's fate was sealed.

  “No!” Tom shouted.

  He saw Fletcher's body dropping from twenty feet up. He ran as hard as he could, but his cassock caught at his legs, pulled at him, slowed him down. He could see the cops rushing in. They were all too late.

  Fletcher landed like a rag doll tossed out a window, his body shattering as it fell across the pews. Someone called out to God. Someone else shouted an expletive. Father Tom fell to his knees, his hands trembling as he reached out to cradle Fletcher's fractured skull. Paramedics rushed in with a stretcher. Too late. He passed a hand over the man's face, closing the sightless eyes, and he murmured a prayer for the soul of Albert Fletcher . . . and one for his own.

  CHAPTER 37

  * * *

  The drug was fading. The fog in her brain was thinning, letting the pain come through like a hot desert sun, searing, unbearable. Megan tried to focus on the questions that floated through her head like wisps of angel hair. He said she had come close. To what? She tried to think back. He had caught her at Priest's house. Was that coincidence? Had she simply stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time and flushed Albert Fletcher out of hiding?

  You don't believe in coincidence, O'Malley. Nor did she believe the disembodied voice belonged to the deacon. There had been no spouting of Bible verse, no promise for damnation. The voice was cool, controlled, frighteningly so. A voice without a soul.

  Did it belong to the professor? He had gone to St. Peter. He couldn't have known she would go to his house. He couldn't have been lying in wait for her.

  Unless someone had warned him.

  Only two people had known she was asking after him—Garrett Wright and Todd Childs.

  Todd Childs, the psych major who worked at The Pack Rat. He had known Olie Swain, had been in computer classes with him—and with Priest. He had helped out at the volunteer center—with Priest. He was working on a project with Priest. She had no doubt he knew all about chemical substances. He would have known what to give her.

  “It's almost showtime.”

  The words were whispered against her lips, an obscene kiss. Megan recoiled, earning a breathy chuckle. He had been silent so long, she had begun to think he'd left. She looked down, tilting her head to the side as much as she dared. A portion of the anonymous black boot came into view.

  “Why Josh?” she murmured, her mouth as dry as powder. “Why his family?”

  “Why not?” he replied, sending a chill straight through her. “Such a perfect little family.” The softly spoken words were venomous with contempt.

  Megan stared down at the boot as he rocked back on his heels, the action flipping a switch of recognition. She'd seen him do that half a dozen times. Just a habit, a quirk, a minor detail she filed away in the back of her mind like eye color or a mole. The words were familiar, too. I feel so bad for Hannah and Paul. Such a perfect family . . .

  Garrett Wright.

  He had seen her standing along the road where Mike Chamberlain had lost control of his car. The helpful Dr. Wright, offering roadside assistance with a benign smile, later offering all he knew about his colleague's whereabouts.

  Hannah and Paul's neighbor. A man who molded the impressionable minds of the students at Harris College. Respected. Above suspicion. A man the media had chosen as an expert witness. For once they had struck pay dirt. The irony was that they might never know it.

  8:41 P.M. 22° WINDCHILL FACTOR: 10°

  Mitch drove away from City Center for the second time that night. The rush of adrenaline that had pumped through him as he'd sped across town to St. E's was long spent. He had hit rock bottom with the death of Albert Fletcher. If Fletcher had taken Josh, they weren't going to hear it from him now. Fletcher couldn't tell them where Josh was, whether Josh was alive or not.

  He wanted to hit something, hard. Or be touched by something soft. The first night he had gone to Megan, she had reached out to him and taken away his pain. She didn't think she needed anyone. Had it ever occurred to her that someone might need her? Someone like him. A beat-up, broken-up, bad-tempered cop.

  He pulled the Explorer in along the curb in front of the big Victorian on Ivy Street and sat there listening to the wipers thump back and forth. The snow was coming down fast and furious. With predictions that the storm would continue through the night, city crews had made no attempt to clear the side streets. People had parked haphazardly. The cars wore blankets of snow four inches thick. Except Megan's car, which was nowhere in sight.

  There were no lights on in the third-floor windows. The black cat sat in the front window, visible against the backdrop of pale curtains, keeping watch for his mistress. She must have gone to St. Paul after all. Mitch didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. He didn't know what the hell he was doing here. What was he going to do—tell her Fletcher was on a slab down at Oglethorpe's Funeral Home and ask her did she want to go to bed with him for old times' sake because he was feeling battered and lost? She'd pull that Glock and plug him right between the eyes.

  The cellular phone nestled in his coat pocket trilled. Mitch dug it out, swearing under his breath. “What now?”

  The silence was broken by a thin, shaky breath. The hair on the back of his neck rose.

  “M-Mitch?”

  His heart jammed at the base of his throat. “Megan? Honey, what's wrong?”

  “G-get the sonofabi—” A strangled cry choked off the sentence.

  “Megan!” Mitch shouted, gripping the steering wheel hard with his free hand. “Megan!”

  The voice that came on the line was not Megan's. Whisper-soft, it skated like a razor along his nerve endings. “We have a present for you, Chief. Come to the southwest entrance of Quarry Hills Park in thirty minutes. Come alone. Not one minute sooner, or Agent O'Malley will die. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Mitch bit the word off. “What do you want?”

  The eerie, breathless chuckle went down his spine like a bony finger. He tightened his grip on the phone and swallowed at the tightness in his throat.

  “To win the game,” the voice murmured. The line went dead.

  Megan did her best to brace herself as she heard him set the phone down. He would punish her. She knew that. He was a control freak and she had broken a little piece of that control. If she was lucky, he would rage and shout and she would at least be able to testify she had heard his voice clearly and distinctly. If she was unlucky, he would kill her.

  “We thought you were a clever girl.” He didn't raise his voice even a fraction, but the anger was there, humming like a power line. “We thought you were a clever girl, but you're just another stupid bitch!”

  The blow caught her in the side of the head. Not the club, bu
t the back of his hand. So hard that the chair rocked sideways. Color burst behind her eyelids and the taste of blood bloomed fresh and thick in her mouth. Before that explosion subsided, he brought his fist down on her battered hand. The tears were instantaneous. As much as Megan hated them, as much as she hated to have him see them streaming out from under the blindfold, there was nothing she could do to stop them. Still, she bit her lip and held her breath against the need to sob aloud.

  This was what he wanted as much as anything: to humiliate her, to prove his own superiority in every way. He had calculated every move, every possibility, but he hadn't counted on her defying him. She could only hope it rattled him enough that he would make a mistake, that the mistake would give Mitch an opportunity to nail him.

  She wanted that opportunity herself. The chance to beat him at his game. The chance to beat him physically, the son of a bitch. She wanted to take that little baton of his and bash his head in, beat him until he told her where Josh was and then beat him some more.

  He used it on her with expertise, knowing just the spots to hit and the perfect amount of force to cause pain but not to make her lose consciousness. Her right knee, her left shoulder, her left calf, her right hand. Again and again he hit the hand, until the slightest touch made her scream.

  When his fury was spent, she could no longer distinguish one pain from the next. The pain had taken on proportions larger than she was, suffocating her, deafening her, breaking her. The only thing she clung to was the burning coal of hatred in her chest and the knowledge that he was the key to finding Josh.

  The bindings around her arms and ankles abruptly loosened and the chair tipped forward, dumping her to the cold floor. His voice seemed to be in both ears at once.

  “Rise and shine, bitch.”

  Megan made no effort to move. The baton cracked against her back, her ribs, her buttocks, and she fought to make her body move. She couldn't get her feet beneath her, couldn't tell which way was up or which way to go to escape the beating. He grabbed her by the hair and hauled her up, slamming her sideways into a wall.

  “We could make you so sorry, little bitch,” he whispered. He closed his teeth on her ear and bit her through the blindfold until she cried out. “If only we had more time to play. But we have a date with your loverboy.”

  CHAPTER 38

  * * *

  DAY 11

  9:03 P.M. 20° WINDCHILL FACTOR: 8°

  Mitch settled back in the trees to wait. From his vantage point he had a clear view of the southwest entrance—as clear a view as the snow allowed. He had come in from the west, from the Lakeside neighborhood, no more than six blocks from the Kirkwood house. Noogie had dropped him off and gone on in the Explorer to wait until the designated time, and Mitch had set out through the thick woods that edged the park, wading through snow that was nearly knee-deep, skidding downhill, tripping on hidden roots and fallen branches.

  He crouched against the thick, rough trunk of an oak tree, fighting to catch his breath. The drive that ran a bent horseshoe circuit between the east and west entrances of the park was no more than thirty feet away, with the parking area less than fifty yards to the south. Mercury-vapor lights were spaced out along the parking lot and farther apart along the drive. Snow danced like thick swarms of fireflies beneath their light.

  He checked his watch. Twelve minutes to spare. Twelve minutes to wait and sweat and wonder what the bastard might have done to Megan. Twelve minutes to worry that his hasty instructions to Dietz and Stevens hadn't been clear enough, that someone would somehow screw up and get Megan killed. There hadn't been time to formulate much of a plan, and he was only too conscious of the fact that the officers he had to work with had no experience with hostage situations. They didn't dare risk radio communications for fear of being overheard on a scanner—by their bad guy or a citizen or a reporter.

  Twelve minutes to wonder who the bastard was. Was it Priest? Had Megan's hunch paid off? Damn her for going off half-cocked with no backup. She knew better. But there hadn't been anyone to go with her. She'd been relieved of duty. And when she had told him her latest theory, he had discounted it and blown her off.

  He couldn't believe it was Priest. He'd been around the man for two years and never felt a bad vibration.

  And you thought Olie was harmless, and that nothing bad would happen in broad daylight at the 7-Eleven.

  He closed his eyes. Oh, Jesus, not again, not Megan, not right before his eyes. Not because he'd been wrong or stupid or too stubborn to see the truth. He couldn't have another person die because of him. Especially not Megan, who had badgered and bullied him from the start to open his eyes and see something besides the bland haven he had created for himself. Not Megan, who had been abandoned and neglected and harassed, and deserved so much better from life.

  The pickup turned in the drive at 9:05, ten minutes ahead of schedule. A late model GMC 4X4, jacked up on heavy tires and sporting the latest in roll bars and a bug guard that read ROY'S TOY. It rolled past the parking area and crept along through the fresh snow. Crouching low behind the cover of the trees, Mitch plowed his way north, rushing to come even with the truck before the driver got out, hoping this was their man and not some horny teenagers looking for a spot to make out.

  The heavy snow sucked at his boots, costing him precious seconds. He lunged ahead, breath sucking in and hissing out through his teeth, his eyes on the pickup as it appeared and disappeared on the other side of the trees. The brake lights went off and he fell against a walnut tree. He slid his hand inside his open parka and eased his Smith & Wesson out of the holster, never looking away from the truck.

  The driver's door opened. A black-clad figure slid out from behind the wheel, featureless, anonymous, a ski mask hiding the face. Dark Man. He took a long look around, scouting for any sign of betrayal. Mitch willed himself invisible, pressing hard against the trunk of the tree, holding his breath as the faceless eyes passed over his section of woods. The air seeped out of his lungs as Dark Man went around to the other side of the truck and let his passenger out.

  He marched her a dozen paces back toward the parking area. Mitch strained to make her out, an impossibility in the poor conditions. It could have been anyone about the right height with dark hair. It could have been a decoy. This could all have been a trick. Megan could have been in a basement somewhere, her fate hinging on whether or not he screwed up here.

  He fought the panic. Think like a cop. See like a cop. What do you see?

  She was leaning heavily against Dark Man, as if unable to walk on her own. Bending over slightly, the gait off-rhythm, a limp. She was in pain. If this was a trick being set up ten minutes ahead of schedule, there would be no reason for the decoy to put on a show. It was Megan, and she was hurt badly. Jesus, what had that animal done to her?

  Megan hobbled away from the truck, leaning hard against her captor, not by choice but necessity and because she thought any hardship she caused him was a small point in her favor. Her hands were bound behind her, the blindfold still in place. She wore no coat, only the thin silk underwear and a sheet for a wrap. The cold bit into her, exacerbating her pain instead of numbing it. She couldn't straighten her right knee. It felt swollen and every step brought a small explosion of pain. She wasn't sure it would hold her weight, but she exaggerated the limp, stumbling into Wright and causing him an awkward step. In punishment he squeezed her hand, wringing a sound of agony from her.

  “Play your part, little bitch”—he brought the nose of a pistol up under her cheekbone—“or I'll blow your brains out.”

  Her role in his game was Humiliation. He had outsmarted them. He had snatched Josh away from under everyone's noses, laid out his little clues and red herrings, and fooled them all. She was to be his grand gesture, the ultimate insult. He had taken her and beaten her and wrapped her in a sheet of evidence he believed would do them no good at all because he believed he was invincible.

  That would ultimately be his undoing, Megan thought. He believed hi
s own delusions of grandeur. God only knew what he had gotten away with over the years, but he wouldn't get away with this. Not as long as she was alive.

  He faced her the way they had come in, arranging the sheet around her to his satisfaction like an oversize shawl, the ends fluttering and snapping in the wind. He had draped it around her before taking her out to get in the truck. A bedsheet. White with red flecks. She knew what it was: bloodstains. Evidence, he told her. He would hand them this evidence wrapped around a cop and still no one would touch him.

  Think again, you bastard.

  She felt him lean close, his breath warm and minty on her face. “It's been lovely,” he murmured, and touched his lips to hers.

  Megan spat at him and won herself a backhand across the mouth with the butt of the gun. As she staggered, the taste of blood bubbled up in her mouth like a warm spring. She spat it out, concentrating not on this newest pain, but on the thought that Mitch would be coming. He had to have risked coming in early. It meant catching their monster. But it could also mean her life. Would he take that chance?

  Come on, Mitch. Be here. Be here.

  She counted the footsteps as Wright moved away from her. Two, three . . . Had he holstered the gun? She inched herself around, her limited gaze on the ground, searching for footprints to tell her she was pointed toward the truck. Bending her head down to her shoulder, she tried to dislodge the blindfold and gained another fraction of an inch of vision in her right eye. Enough to see his legs.

  If she rushed him—if she could—would it delay him enough for Mitch to arrive? Or would she die for nothing? The thoughts and questions shot through her mind, all of them boiling down to a simple truth: She didn't want to die like this—in disgrace, with so much left undone and unsaid.