“Hey!” John protested. “Wait a second—what are you doing?”
“You don’t need these,” Sil said sweetly.
Although he seemed less than overjoyed, John finally slipped them off. After a moment’s hesitation, he leaned forward and kissed her tenderly. She stayed very still for the moment, enjoying the soft feel of his lips against hers, the way his tongue just barely grazed her bottom lip. “You don’t say much,” he said huskily.
Sil smiled slightly and shrugged, a small motion she’d seen him make before when he didn’t seem to know the answer to a question that wasn’t very important. “You know I like you,” she said softly.
“I know,” he whispered.
His breath was warm in her ear, incredibly arousing. It was all she could do to keep from snatching him to her. “I don’t think it’s too soon for us to be together,” she managed in a silky voice. She dipped one hand under the water and searched until she found his knee. “Do you?”
“No,” he said hoarsely. “It’s not t-too soon.”
His fingers brushed one of her breasts once, then again. She strained toward him and kissed him harder, let her fingers find the velvety hair along his belly and travel down. His fumbling hand stopped her before she could go any farther. “Hey,” he said with a nervous snicker, “that’s a little too fast.”
“I want you to be inside me,” Sil said urgently. She stroked the side of his face but he didn’t reciprocate. Instead, he pulled even farther away from her in the water.
“I—I seem to have a problem.” John wouldn’t meet her eyes at all now.
“What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously. She tried to think of the things that could have gone wrong, but she was a novice at this. Was she not attractive enough? Perhaps he was thinking of someone else, anonymous competition like the girl at the ID that Sil had eliminated. Sil’s hand went to her hair; the ends were wet and plastered against her neck. Maybe that was making her unappealing. “Don’t you think I’m pretty?” she asked aloud.
“Of course I do,” he said in a placating tone that she wasn’t sure she liked. When she said nothing, he scooted back to her side on the bench and took her by the hand. His fingers rubbed hers, creating little waves of pleasure that expanded outward, creeping into her arms and spreading into her chest and belly. “We’ll get there, baby. But there’s no hurry, okay? Just relax. Take it easy and let things happen naturally.”
Sil nodded, even though she had no idea what he was saying or why he would want things between them to move more slowly. She reached to kiss him again, letting her tongue probe his lips and teeth. The clean, just-brushed taste of his mouth made her want him more, but he pulled back again. “You’re so passionate,” he said. “I really love that.”
He was saying all the right things, but his voice was too tense and his anxiety was contagious. When he drew back yet again, Sil watched him through half-closed eyelids but made no move to follow him. She wondered if he was expecting someone, maybe some other woman who shared this house with him, someone he had conveniently “forgotten” to mention. Jealousy flared, and on the heels of that, anger. He didn’t find her exciting because he had given too much of himself elsewhere and he wasn’t strong enough to couple with her, too. He had seemed so nice, caring and considerate, but she’d been wrong in thinking he was a suitable mate. Still, she wasn’t ready to give up; after all, she needed someone to father her child, not a lifelong companion.
She tried kissing him again. He returned her kiss as if he’d enjoyed it and she could sense his ardor increasing, smell the sexy scent of passion-induced perspiration beginning to layer his skin. Finally he was getting into it, losing himself in the physical sensations she was bringing out, and when she raised herself off the underwater bench and slid her legs around his lower body, he pulled her tight against his chest and moaned against her neck.
Panting, she tried to maneuver herself over him, but felt resistance once again. Frustration abruptly welled in her; what was the matter with this man? She started to say something to him about it, demand an answer, then a faint sound eased into her ears, something apart from their heavy breathing and the sounds of desire, faint but distinctly different from the muted gurgling of the Jacuzzi. Sil scowled savagely as she gazed over John’s shoulder in the direction of the house, trying to see more than the patio furniture and close-cropped hedges would allow. Unmoving against John, she tilted her head and strained to hear again. Had she really heard . . . ?
Yes. Footsteps, coming up the front pathway to the house.
30
Ringing the doorbell and banging on the front door proved futile, but Press would’ve bet next month’s paycheck that John Carey was home. The front of the house was dark except for the soft-bulbed carriage lights flanking a double-wide oak front door with beveled-glass insets. The door turned out to be locked and moving quietly, Press motioned for Laura to follow him around the driveway running along the north side of the house. As expected, he found a row of immaculately clean trash and recycling bins next to a sliding-glass door through which they could see a darkened area with a small glass-and-chrome table and two tan leather chairs—the breakfast area. On the far side of the room, low light trickled from another doorway, probably the sink or stove light from the kitchen. When he gave a tentative push on the recessed handle in the door, the glass door moved easily aside.
“Come on,” he whispered.
“I can’t believe he left this door unlocked,” Laura murmured crabbily. “Why not leave the front door wide open too?”
Press shrugged, his eyes checking every shadow as they stepped cautiously over the threshold. “Guys do that all the time when they take out the garbage. It’s like losing the remote control and finding it on the coffee table. He’d check it later and lock it before going to bed.”
Laura shook her head but didn’t comment. As a matter of principle, she flicked the latch to “lock” behind her as she slid the door closed, then followed Press into the recesses of John Carey’s house.
“What is it?” John asked. He watched Sil for a second, puzzled. “Do you hear someth—hey, wait. You’re right; someone’s at the front door.” In a single smooth movement that Sil didn’t see coming, he used the buoyancy of the water to lift her weight from his lap and rotate her so that she was once more sitting next to him on the underwater bench that ran around the inside of the Jacuzzi. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait,” Sil entreated. “Don’t go, please. I—I want a baby.”
John froze, his eyes nearly bulging with shock. “Excuse me?” This time he made no effort to disguise his retreat. “Whoa, lady. I think you’ve got the wrong guy here. We only met today, remember?” He raised an eyebrow and reached for the swim trunks he’d folded over the side of the hot tub, all trace of his earlier intentions evaporated. “Tell you what,” he suggested in a voice that made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate an argument, “I’ll get the door. You get dressed, and we’ll talk about this after whoever’s at the front door leaves.”
The sight of John turning his back on her infuriated her more than anything she’d encountered so far, even that foolish, sickly Robbie trying to force her. Cloaked as he’d been in the scents of cigarette smoke and liquor, she’d had no way of knowing about Robbie until he’d washed himself clean in the shower, but John was healthy and able-bodied, yet he was outright rejecting her offer to mate and produce offspring, insulting her.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Sil hissed. “You’re the one who’s flawed.” She clawed at him and yanked him backward into the water before he could cry out. When he opened his mouth to yell, she shoved his head under the water to keep him quiet, holding him in place with one hand. The knocking had stopped but she thought she heard another sound, that of a door opening, but John was making too much noise, splashing furiously as he tried to come up for air. Impatient, she smacked the side of his skull against the underwater light next to her knee; the light sputtered and went out, but John continu
ed to fight, his struggles growing more feeble by the second.
In the new darkness of the hot tub, she felt the change coming on her and surrendered to it. Along with the rest of her body, the hand restraining John slid around his neck, lengthening and bulging with muscular knobs and sharp-ended fingers that forced past his lips and teeth and filled his mouth until he could no longer close it. By the time the appendage erupted from his lower abdomen in a watered-down rush of blood and internal organs, John Carey was already dead, his lungs filled with hot, chlorinated water. When she surged out of the tub and left his corpse floating facedown, Sil was unlike anything that had ever existed on the face of the earth. A few seconds later she was over the rear fence and gone, vanished into the surrounding woods.
This time Press was prepared. Following instructions, McRamsey had sent back to the complex for Press’s MP5SD4, and the submachine gun felt like an old and trusted sidekick in his hands, as though he could shoot blind and the weapon would aim itself for him. Laura Baker, he had to admit, wasn’t being nearly the pain in the ass he’d thought she’d be; she followed orders, stayed safely behind him, and didn’t make a sound, moving with a catlike grace he found enticing and worthy of future reflection. “There,” he muttered. “Out on the patio. Stay here.” She nodded, then promptly followed him as he moved toward the French doors that led out to the back, blowing the hell out of his belief that she would follow his orders. Sliding the screen aside, he crept out with her at his heels. “Uh-oh,” he said in a hushed voice. “Too late.”
“Why?” Laura peered around him, then saw the body floating facedown in the Jacuzzi. The water was an ugly shade of diluted crimson. Her mouth turned down and her gaze flicked to the wide patio and the thin trees surrounding the house. “She can’t have gone far,” she said. “Look—the patio stones are still wet and she left her clothes on the lounge chair. Plus she left a trail.”
“Call Fitch,” Press told her. “I’m going after Sil—and this time stay put.” When she nodded grudgingly, Press took off for the fence, following the angle of the wet footprints that led from the wide stones of the patio onto the grass. A glance over his shoulder verified that Laura hadn’t come after him; standing next to the hot tub, she already had the cellular phone out of her purse and next to her ear.
A stirring on the other side of the chain-link fence made Press crouch, the 9mm sub ready. First the grass rustled, then the disturbance moved quickly into the tree branches, something swift and unseen moving just beyond the wan glow thrown by the veranda lights. To his right, unlatched and open about a foot or so, was a gate leading from the grounds and beyond; Press didn’t know if the swinging motion he saw was real or his overactive imagination. He pushed through it and looked longingly back at the Carey house; it seemed safe and very far away. The low lights from the tall windows were no more than soft yellow slits way out here, and with a start, Press realized he could no longer see Laura. She must have gone inside, he decided as his gaze searched the trees. That would certainly be preferable to standing next to the dead man while waiting for Fitch and his crew to arrive.
He took a step forward, noting that underfoot was nothing but sparse, moldering leaves—no telltale crunch or breaking branches marked his passage and it would provide the same cover for Sil—or whatever she’d become.
A noise overhead made Press tense. Leaves and branches rustled lightly overhead, indistinct from the cloudy night sky. Something was up there, but it seemed too small to be anything like Sil—
Before he could talk himself out of it, Press let the gun drop to hang by its sling at his side, grabbed a sturdy branch, and hauled himself off the ground. He swung his legs over and twisted until he was upright and balanced against the tree trunk with one hand; the other had the Heckler & Koch out, set to full auto fire and cocked without a conscious command.
Something fast scurried at him out of the blackness. Small and fleet, Press nearly shot the frightened squirrel before it veered off the branch and raced out of sight up the main trunk. His exhale of relief almost turned into a tumble when Laura’s chiding, amused words came from the air below his feet.
“Very impressive. You can come down now, Tarzan. The rest of civilization has arrived.”
As Press did a double swing to the ground and again let the gun drop down to his side, neither he nor Laura felt the sharp blue eyes that watched them through a knothole in a neighbor’s fence twenty yards away.
Dr. Fitch’s face was white in the glare of the spotlights sweeping across the expansive patio and rear yard of John Carey’s home. “I want six blocks cordoned off in all directions,” he told the master sergeant of the Special Forces Unit. “Helicopters, searchlights, dogs—get it all out. We’re not screwing around here. I want this woman found within the hour.” The officer nodded stonily as Fitch marched back to join the rest of the team at the hot tub. “She can’t have gotten far,” he said to Press. “Carey’s body is still warm and his car is still in his garage.”
“No kidding?” Press’s eyes were unreadable in the wildly flickering lights. “Gee, I think I heard that line in that last six movies I saw.”
Fitch regarded him angrily. “This is not a joking matter, Lennox.”
“Oh, I thought finding this guy with his intestines ripped out was real funny, Doc—about as funny as having to go after the thing that did it,” Press shot back. “And I really like your line about how the body’s still warm—considering the guy was found floating in a hot tub.”
“You guys can argue about this latter,” Stephen cut in. “Right now Dr. Fitch needs to get his forensic examiner to check Carey and see if there’s evidence he had sex before she killed him. He—” Stephen frowned as he saw Dan off to one side, staring into the scarlet-stained water. “Dan? Are you all right?”
The black man blinked, then scrubbed at his face with his hands. When he looked at Stephen, his eyes seemed slightly out of focus, as if his thoughts were far away. “I was just realizing that the sight of blood used to scare me, but now I think I’m getting used to it,” he said faintly. “Sometimes I think that’s the scariest part about this.”
“Guys?” Laura called from a spot near the end of the patio. She motioned for them to join her. “One of the security men found something you should see.” When they got to the edge of the patio, the microbiologist led them through the fence, then off to the right. After a short distance they could see several of the MPs next to the high redwood fence that separated John Carey’s property from his neighbor’s land to the north. One of the soldiers gave a final tug with a crowbar and a two-foot-wide section came free, leaving an opening to the other side. At the foot of the gap was a loose mound of dirt, and when they crowded around it, they saw a burrow curving several feet down, until it disappeared beneath the underside of the fitted boards. Another soldier, covered with earth, wriggled out of the hole on the neighbor’s side of the fence.
“It goes all the way through,” he told them unnecessarily.
“Christ,” Press said, “no wonder we couldn’t find her. What is she—some kind of giant gopher?”
“Damn it.” Fitch shoved his hands in his pockets, then headed back toward the house. The rest of the team followed wordlessly. “She’s slipped away again, hasn’t she? It took us what? Ten minutes, maybe more, to find that . . . burrow, or whatever you want to call it. We still have no idea how fast she can run, if she got a ride from someone on the road, or hell—if she even looks the same as she did on the motel video. Sure, we can go house to house and ask, but we can’t force people to let us actually search without getting some serious backlash from the local authorities. What a mess.” He stopped by the driver’s door to the van, waiting for the rest of the group to climb inside.
“Well,” Stephen said, “we got closer this time.”
“Closer?” Fitch’s voice rose until he was almost squeaking. “What do you think this is—a kid’s game? Is that what I’m supposed to tell the National Security Council when they ask for resul
ts? That we’re closer?”
Stephen spread his hands helplessly. “Sorry, Doc. Just trying to think positive.”
“I don’t need positive thinking.” Fitch was practically yelling now, punctuating his words by thrusting two stiffened fingers into the palm of one hand. “I need you people to use your expertise and find this woman.”
“Creature,” Laura said mildly. “She’s not a woman.”
Fitch whirled to face her. “Whatever she is, she shouldn’t be running free!”
“Hey, Fitch.” Press’s voice was icy. “You created her, and you lost her. It’s your fuckup that the rest of us are trying to fix, so before you quit screaming for the night, be sure to find a mirror and include your own reflection.”
“That’s very clever, Lennox,” Fitch said bitterly, but he made a visible effort to calm himself before continuing. “Can anyone speculate about what her next move will be?”
“I found this on the living-room table.” Dan held out a Polaroid print and everybody gathered around to study it. “Do you think it’s her?”
“Maybe—I think so. But I doubt we’ll get any more off this than we did the motel video. They’re just too small in the print.” Press shook his head.
“It’s a pity Carey wasn’t a better photographer,” Fitch said as he took the photo from Dan. He opened the door to the van and held the picture close to his eyes under the faint glow of the vehicle’s overhead light. “The way he positioned the camera must have made it take a light reading off the patio light behind Sil rather than the area beyond the fence. Everything in the front of the shot is too dark—you can barely see their faces. It’s as useless as everything else we have so far.” His shoulders slumped. “Climb in,” he said morosely. “We’re taking off.”
“Where’re we going?” Dan asked as he levered himself into the backseat.
“We’re all beat,” Fitch replied. He turned the ignition key and waited for Stephen and Dan to get settled and snap their seat belts into place. “Press, you and Laura meet us back at the Biltmore. We’ll go over what we have, shower up, maybe grab a bite before sacking out. We need to clear our heads and start fresh.” He gazed blankly out the windshield. “We’ve got to come up with something, we’ve got to. As of right now, we have no idea where she is.”
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