The second time she was easier to understand. 'He's here. Isn't he?'
Monroe spoke. 'Who's here?'
'Where am I?'
John held a hand up to stop Monroe confusing her. 'You're in the hospital, Julia.'
'Am I being born?'
'No.'
'Did you say something about a photograph?'
'We found a picture which shows some woods. Do you remember taking it?'
'There's lots of woods. Always have been. Ever since I was a little, little girl.'
'Why did you take the picture, Julia?'
'What picture?'
'The picture of the woods.'
'Make memories. Right? Right? Right? Wonderful.'
'I don't understand what you're saying.'
'Did you ever go to Disneyworld?'
'Yes,' John said. 'Long time ago.'
'Nobody would take me when I was young. I took myself when I grew up. It's not the same.'
'No.'
'Nobody should have to take themselves to Disneyworld.'
'Julia…'
'Did you shit on me? Everything smells wrong.' Her tongue started to loll again. Her chin trembled. 'Oh, it's bad.'
'Julia—why? Why did you kill them?'
'I got it wrong, okay? None of it helps. It's a fucking, fucking disease.' Then suddenly her voice changed, dropping almost an octave. 'Twelve step me to hell, you nigger.'
She laughed uproariously, arching her back. Then it became a cough, and suddenly she was being sick.
Monroe slapped the attention button and John quickly rolled her onto her side. Very soon afterwards the room was full of medics and we were shoved out into the corridor.
We waited in silence while the people inside did their thing. After a half hour they started to leave, although a nurse was left by her bed. The last person in a white coat was a woman who glared at us as she shut the door firmly behind her.
'I told you she couldn't be talked to right now.'
'She's a suspect in two murders,' Monroe said.
'Your problem,' the doctor snapped. 'She's dying. The damage to her brain is compromising her autonomic nervous system. That's the part that controls the things we don't normally have to do deliberately, like breathe. I don't care what she may or may not have done, you don't have the right to hasten her death. Disturb her again and I'll call the police.'
'Ma'am,' said the uniform still sitting in a chair to one side of the door, 'um, I am the police.'
'More senior police, then,' the doctor said, and strode off down the corridor.
After she'd gone Monroe turned to Zandt. 'So. Was it worth it?'
'She took the picture. She killed those men because of something that took place a long time ago. Something that made her want to record a particular part of the woods for later reference. She saw something happen there.'
'She saw whoever killed the victim we found,' I said. 'And she's the only person who might be able to tell us who that was.'
'The body was definitely a woman,' Monroe said. 'Mid-forties. They lifted the rest of the skeleton last night. And the signs are you were right about when it happened. So who is she? Who killed her?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'But I believe there's a fifty-fifty chance he's the person who took Nina.'
'If not him, then who?'
'Ghosts,' I said, bitterly. 'People you don't believe in and nobody can ever catch.'
•••
We left the hospital. Monroe evidently felt it wasn't worth waiting there any longer, and I believed he was right. Julia didn't strike me as someone who was going to say anything useful again.
John walked straight over to my car. I hung back, wanting a last word with Charles. I was surprised at how he looked. Tired I'd seen before, but now he looked defeated.
'You've got to find something, Charles,' I said.
'I'm doing everything I can.'
'I hope so. We're running out of time. And if I don't find Nina, your life is not going to be worth living.'
I left him standing there and walked over to the car. Before I climbed in I pressed the speed dial for Nina's number one more time.
Still nothing. And wherever her phone was, whether it was switched on or off, sooner or later the battery was going to trickle out.
Chapter 30
The cellar was worse than the van. Nina knew life had come to a sorry pass if she looked on the VW as the glory days, but there had been movement, at least. There was the possibility she might be taken somewhere and released: pushed out into the wilderness, or rolled out onto the road at speed. Neither were great options, but they were doors to other realities—if you were strong, and if you were lucky. Perhaps a line-caught fish felt the same, right up until it was knocked on the back of the head. When you are lying on the floor of a cellar, it does not feel as if strength and luck are nearby. Instead there is damp, there is coldness, and there is the unforgiving sense of being underground.
Being under the ground is not good. Under the ground is where you go to be dead.
She knew she was lying in a space about thirty feet square. She'd gotten a glimpse of it when she was brought down the wooden staircase, and tried to look around before the door was shut again, returning the cellar to darkness. Immediately she closed her eyes, so as not to be misled by shadows. She felt the space around her, pictured where the supports were, thought about how you might try to get to the staircase: assuming you weren't lying flat on your back with your wrists and ankles tied. She tried to lock these ideas in her mind, but it had been a long time since she'd slept and there was a ringing in her ears. She felt physically wretched. Being short a pint or two of blood didn't help, but that shouldn't make you vomit, which had happened five minutes previously. She didn't know what damage petrol fumes could do, but whatever it was, they had evidently done it.
She had to remain alert. The guy who'd taken her had failed in some way. She had heard Paul called him 'James'. He was supposed to have done something else, either instead of, or as well as, abducting her. What? Not killing her, it seemed, otherwise Paul would have done that right away. He wasn't someone who kept people alive for the fun of it. Quite the opposite.
It was not a good question to have to ask yourself, but why was she not supposed to be dead? And what could she do to try to stay…
Then she remembered something else. She recalled that in the van she'd realized that she probably still had her cell phone. She knew she'd turned it off prior to the meeting with Reidel, so it should still have charge. Hopefully. In the van she'd been too constrained and sedated to dream of actually finding the phone.
Here it might be different. If she moved fast. She didn't even have to get a call out. If they had a beacon trace on it, or if Ward had been trying to call her and suddenly got through at last…
Nina craned her neck, turned her head on the dusty, splintered floor. When she'd been brought down into the cellar a bulky bag of her abductor's stuff had come too, everything out of the VW. It was lying against the wall, she thought. She'd been wearing her coat when he came to her hotel room. The phone would have been deep in the inside pocket. It must now be in his bag.
After being able to do nothing except withstand discomfort, she had a job now, a proper one.
Get hold of the phone. And not die, of course.
•••
The best way would be getting herself to a sitting position. That way she could shuffle across the floor in the direction of the bag. Wouldn't be the fastest method, but it gave her a little control.
It took five minutes to wrench and turn herself upright from where she'd been left. Then she oriented her feet in the right direction, and wriggled her ass.
It worked, kind of. It was slow. The floor was uneven. There were things lying on it. Neither became obvious until she ran into an obstruction, and then she had to work her way around.
But slowly she kept moving, until her feet met the wall. Swivelled right a little, reaching out. A rustling sound.
> The bag.
Now what? Couldn't use her hands and feet. Coat might be buried deep in there. It was thick, too—Ward had bought it for her against the coming cold of a Pacific Northwest winter. There was going to be no way she could actually get the phone out. But maybe if she put pressure on the bag…
Then she heard the sound of footsteps approaching up above.
She fell back onto her side immediately, straightened her body out, and rolled. She rolled fast. It didn't matter what she hit on the way, she had to get back to where she'd been. They couldn't suspect there was any reason for her to want to get over to the bag.
She made it, via thudding and scraping collisions with every single unseen obstruction. Something caught at her wrist and she had to yank it hard to keep going. She was in pain, and breathless. But she got back to where she'd started. Made sure she was lying flat. Forced her chest not to heave up and down.
She heard the sound of the cellar door being opened. She raised her head, still trying not to pant. She could see two men standing at the top of the stairs. The Upright Man and the older one. She got a glimpse of the younger kid standing well back.
Could he be a help to her? There had been something in the kid's face which said this was outside the world he understood. Could she try to tap some kind of older sister vein in him? Yeah, dream on, Nina. But how old would his mother be? Could she be his defenceless mom instead, some pie-wielding sweetie? Would it help?
But when the two older men started down the stairs, the boy remained behind, and after a moment disappeared from view into some other part of the house.
Paul didn't come over to her when he reached the basement, but walked off to one side. He squatted down and seemed to inspect a portion of the ground for a while, reaching out and pulling his finger through the dirt.
'Don't think our wannabe is going to be a problem any more,' he said to the older man. 'Again, no thanks to you.' He stood up again and looked down at Nina. 'We might as well keep our agent for the time being. There will come a time when that's no longer the case. I will call you then, and if I tell you to kill her you'll do it immediately. No playing. Understood?'
The man nodded.
'He was supposed to kill us both,' Nina said, quietly. 'Is that it? He mistook Reidel for Ward, and killed him, but then decided he wanted me for himself
Paul came so he was standing directly over Nina. 'You're sharp, Agent Baynam. Sharp and super-smart. But wrong. James was supposed to kill you. But Ward wasn't his other target.'
'Who was?'
'I'll leave that as an exercise for the student.'
'You're a lunatic'
'No. And I'm not the one tied up in a basement and stinking of stale sweat and fear, so right now nine out of ten cat-owners would prefer my reality to yours.'
The men left soon afterwards, and she heard the door to the house being slammed and the sound of a car driving away. Nina made herself wait before she tried for the phone again, to make sure they'd all gone. In the meantime she tried to think calmly, see if there was anything to learn from what Paul had said. A classic 1930s text she'd read once described a psychopath as a 'reflex machine', which could mimic the human personality so effectively that it was impossible to say what about them is not real. You saw something of this in the eyes of the men who end up in fights in bars. If you passed by early in the evening—assuming you were incautious enough to look their way, which is a bad, bad idea—you could see a restlessness in their faces, a blankness washed with slippery good cheer. The silent are usually misanthropes or depressed or serious drinkers getting on with business. There is a cold and hectic charm about the dangerous ones, like the blurred numbers on a computer read-out: forever spinning to the conclusion of some complex calculation, but never settling on a result. A result would be a fixed personality, something you could reason with. There is no such thing inside such men. They are pockets of violence waiting for an excuse, demonic whirlwinds in human wrappers.
The truly mad are something else again. With them, there is something inside—it's just not clear what it is. Dr Cleckley's 'reflex machine' model begged a question: what was it that was doing the impersonating? What was this 'machine', and what was it doing when it wasn't impersonating humankind? What were its normal responses? Where did it come from? What did it want?
Was it actually something different in each of them, or was it possible that it was the same thing, the same demonic substance or insane spirit, staring out of all of their eyes? Everything in Nina's training and belief system said otherwise, that these were damaged humans, manifesting individual psychoses and pathologies.
But when someone like Paul looked down at you…sometimes you had to wonder.
•••
She had just decided she couldn't wait any longer when she heard the sound of the cellar door opening again, and light leaked down. Her heart sank. They hadn't all gone after all.
Heavy footsteps descended. It could only be James, the one who'd taken her blood. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, where he sat in silence for some time, smoking.
'What happens now, James?' she asked, dully. 'We wait until your leader says you can kill me?'
'He's not my leader. And I'm not James.'
'That's what he called you.'
'I'm Jim Westlake. I take photographs.'
'My father was a photographer.' This was not true, of course. 'What kind of pictures?'
The man hesitated, then got up and went over to his bag. He took Nina's jacket out and laid it on the ground, and Nina's heart caught in her throat.
So it was here. That was great news. But lying on the floor, it could be knocked. The phone could fall out and be discovered. But if she could get to it…or have it brought to her…
'I'm cold,' she said. 'This floor is so cold.'
He didn't seem to hear. When he straightened he was holding a small box, something that looked as though it once held a pair of children's shoes. He sat back on the bottom stair and opened it. He looked through the contents for a while, as if he'd forgotten she was there. Then, without even looking at her, he held up a few Polaroid photographs so she could see.
Nina couldn't tell much except they were of women or girls, of various ages, taken somewhere that looked sunny.
'I didn't do anything,' he said. 'None of them. For years. I even lived next to…Look.'
He flipped quickly through the pictures for a moment, then yanked a single one out. 'Look.'
He held a picture so close to her face she could barely focus to make out what it showed. The picture was of two little girls, maybe four, five years old. Smiling.
'Cute.'
'My neighbours.'
'Really? Next door to here?'
'No. I haven't lived here for a long time.'
'So how come you can just walk in?'
'I still own it but…I lived here with my wife.'
'You're married?'
'Not any more.'
Nina opened her mouth to ask another question, but closed it again slowly. She was not in charge here. This was not an interview with a man awaiting trial. She let silence settle.
Eventually he spoke.
'We met when I got out of the army. We moved around for a few years, all over the place. Then we found this area and it felt right. I got myself a teaching certificate. I'd always been good at numbers. I taught math at the school. But…'
He left a long pause before he continued.
'I'd been okay all that time, overseas. In the army I could have…but I didn't. But something…after I'd been here a while I just wasn't right any more. Couldn't get my head to add things up properly. The sums started going wrong again.'
Nina couldn't help herself. 'What? You're saying it's Thornton's fault? The town made you do it? Take my advice, that defence just won't play.'
'I don't care. For a long time I was like everybody else. I knew I could be wrong if I let myself. But I didn't want to have to do it. I…I did my best. But then.' He put his hea
d in his hands. 'A student. At the school. She reminded me of Karla. That's all it took. She looked like Karla. That was all. Bang. Just like that.'
'Who's Karla? Your wife?'
'My wife was Laurie. Aren't you listening?'
'I'm sorry. So who was Karla?'
'A girl I knew a long time ago. At school. She was my first.'
'The first girl you had sex with.'
'Yes.'
'But that's not what you meant.'
'No.'
'You killed her.'
'Yes.'
He told Nina about the girl, this Karla. He could remember her face in bitter detail. He could remember the way she walked. He could recall preparations, too, undertaken under erasure in his head while apparently doing and thinking something else entirely, something normal. He remembered, too, sitting on the edge of the river afterwards, a waterside where he had played as a kid. It was dark and cold that night and spitting with rain. He sat on the hard, pocked mud, her severed hand beside him, and there was no light anywhere apart from a few distant twinkles in the windows of houses right up along the opposite edge of the water. If you turned away from those and looked out and listened to the wind you could believe that the whole world had disappeared, that you had gone back in time to a place when the things you now held dear had yet to be brought into being, when men and boys were free to be themselves. The specifics of what he had done were already fading around the edges, and he was oddly unconcerned with the notion of capture (that too would return, and in spades). For the moment he felt he was sitting to one side of creation, and it was hard to understand how it could impinge upon him any more. When he turned and looked once more at the house lights he knew they could not see him, just as he knew that if he knocked on their doors the inhabitants would neither hear nor see him. Their life was closed to him now. There was nowhere else to go. He just sat there in the rain and listened to the sounds of wild nature until he was too cold and walked the long mile back home, where he ate a piece of cold chicken and then went to bed.
Nothing like it happened again for a very long time. It could possibly have ended there, stayed at one, remained true but unique. It didn't. Karla was his first. She was a long way from being the last.
Blood of Angels Page 30
