Maps of Hell mw-3

by Paul Johnston

  I watched her go toward reception and then got out of the pickup, my hand on the Glock in my belt. I suddenly felt very vulnerable. I checked the area. There was no sign of anything suspicious. I watched Mary come out of the building, telling myself to be careful with her. I wished I’d specified that I wanted a room on my own, but I didn’t have the means to pay for one and didn’t want to antagonize her.

  As she got closer, I saw she was holding up two keys. I gave a sigh of relief.

  “We’re in the corner rooms over there,” she said, pointing to the far left of the building.

  I drove the pickup over, parking it as far from the lights as I could, and front end out so we could make a quick getaway if necessary. We took the food inside and ate in the room Mary had taken. Mine was right on the corner.

  “Right,” I said when we’d finished the potato salad and cold cuts. “I’m going to have a shower and then crash out. I should be awake by daybreak. We’ll get going then.”

  She nodded, watching me as I went to the door. “Is that it, Matt?” she said, with an uncertain smile.

  “What?” I played dumb. “Oh, sorry. Thanks a lot, Mary. You saved my ass. Good night.” I closed the door behind me and went to the pickup. I reckoned having the assault rifle in my room was safer.

  I was still wet from the shower when Mary made her move. There was a soft knocking on the door. I groaned and wrapped a towel round my waist. She was a good-looking woman and I’d have happily frolicked with her if there hadn’t been two problems-one, the blonde woman I loved and, two, the fact that Mary was emotionally fragile. Reluctantly, I took the chain off and opened up.

  She slipped past me before I could react. I turned and saw her on the bed. She’d been wearing only a towel, too, but now it was on the floor. She was lying with her legs raised and slightly apart. The breasts that I’d suspected were spectacular turned out to be so. But it was her face I couldn’t avoid, an expression that was a mixture of desire and anxiety. For all her physical allure, Mary was a sad spectacle.

  “Please, Matt,” she said, her voice breaking. “I…I want you.”

  I went over to the bed and picked up her towel. She grabbed mine and pulled it away. Her fingers moved on to my cock, which responded in a way I couldn’t control.

  “Mary,” I said, before she locked her lips on mine. Her nipples, large and firm, pressed against my chest. I felt the blood burn in my veins as lust took command. I stopped resisting and fell gently forward. The hairs in her groin crushed against my belly.

  “Matt,” she said, the breath catching in her throat, “you know you want this.”

  I closed my eyes and let her guide my fingers inside her. She was wet, soft and yielding.

  “Oh, Matt…”

  And then I saw the other woman, the one I knew I loved. Her hair was spread out around her face and her lips were slightly open. “Matt,” she whispered, her body arching as I entered her, “I…love…you.”

  In that instant, her name came to me. Karen, she was Karen. Karen Oaten.

  I pulled rapidly away from Mary.

  Her eyes sprang wide-open. “Matt? What is it?”

  I had grabbed my towel and wrapped it round me again.

  Mary stretched forward, but I stepped beyond her reach.

  “Please, Matt,” she pleaded. “Tell me…tell me what’s the matter.”

  I crashed to my knees, head to the floor. I hadn’t just remembered Karen’s name. I now also knew that she was over five months pregnant, carrying our son. My God-she had disappeared-she was lost. Had they killed her? Great sobs tore out of my chest as I banged my forehead on the thin carpet. I felt Mary’s arms round my shoulders.

  “Matt, please…don’t be like this…please…Matt…”

  I couldn’t tell her. She couldn’t help me find Karen. She didn’t deserve to be caught up any deeper in my screwed-up world.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes and pulling away from her. “I’m sorry, Mary. I can’t do this. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m sorry…”

  I couldn’t look at her as she shrank away. I heard the door close after her. I wiped the back of my arm across my eyes and stood up unsteadily. Karen, I was thinking, Karen, where are you? What’s happened to you? At the back of my mind was the thought that I should get out of the motel now, get down to Washington as soon as I could. There would be leads to follow up-she couldn’t just have vanished into the air. Then I saw images of offices, concerned people, some in suits, some in uniform, and I knew that I’d already followed everything up before I was taken to the camp. There had been no traces of Karen, either in D.C. or in the Shenandoah Valley. She really was lost. But I couldn’t believe she was dead, I couldn’t believe that.

  I collapsed on the bed and fell like a stone into the empty darkness.

  I woke up with a start. According to the radio clock, it was 5:43 a.m. I stood up, my arms and legs still half-asleep and looked around the room. Then I remembered the night before-Mary, and my remembering Karen.

  Pulling on my clothes, I collected the guns. Mary had the pickup keys, but I wasn’t going to deprive her of the vehicle. I would slip away and hitch a lift south. I went to the window and opened a couple of the blind’s plastic strips.

  Then froze.

  A pair of police cruisers was pulling into the parking lot, their lights off despite the early-morning gloom. I looked to the left and saw Mary standing outside her door. She turned toward me and the cold fury on her face told me immediately that she had betrayed me. In truth, I could hardly blame her.

  More police vehicles came into the parking lot. Among them were unmarked cars. All were pointing toward my room. I was caught like a rat in a well-deserved trap.

  Twenty-Eight

  Peter Sebastian was sitting in his office on the third floor of the Hoover Building. He had spent the night on the sofa there and was now compiling a report on the so-called “occult murders.” The media, especially the evening TV news shows, had gone after the killings from every weird angle they could come up with. There had been theories that Professor Singer had been one of Monsieur Hexie’s customers, that Loki and the Giants were a front for a far-right terrorist organization, and that the killer was a former cult member with a grudge against any and all mystic sources of knowledge and power.

  At least the FBI’s involvement with the investigation was behind the scenes and he hadn’t been required to make a statement. That tiresome duty had fallen to MPDC Chief of Detectives Rodney Owen. In front of the cameras, he had been tight-lipped and decidedly non-user-friendly-which was unsurprising, given that his detectives had failed to make any progress with the three murders.

  Not that Sebastian blamed them, despite his dislike of “Versace” Pinker. He had checked both detectives’ records and knew that they were as good as anyone under Owen’s command; the chief himself had made sure there were plenty of people backing up Clem Simmons and his partner. The problem was the series of killings itself. Sebastian had the feeling this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime cases-one that either made or broke the careers of the officers. Not that he or Dana Maltravers had been able to make any meaningful contributions. Not even the Bureau’s experts had been any help so far. The truth was, they were up against a meticulous murderer with an impenetrable agenda.

  Sebastian got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He hadn’t eaten anything apart from sandwiches for the past three days and his stomach was giving him hell. Too bad. Like his family, none of whom he’d seen for those three days, his body was going to have to take whatever was thrown at it till the case was solved. He looked at the notes he had made. With Matt Wells out of the frame for the professor’s killing, building a case against him was hard. Sebastian asked himself why he was so sold on the Englishman. The fingerprints at Monsieur Hexie’s place were a solid piece of evidence, but it was hardly conclusive. Okay, the guy was a smart-ass writer with ties to Detective Chief Superintendent Karen Oaten of the Metropolitan Police, and he’d made a
lot of money from the book he’d done about the White Devil, but it was hardly his fault that he’d been chosen by that crazy killer as both scribe and victim. Nor was it Wells’s fault that his ex-girlfriend, the one who called herself the Soul Collector, was a multiple murderer.

  Still, Sebastian didn’t buy everything about Wells. People who attracted trouble like the Brit had always had something to hide. It seemed likely that Matt Wells knew a lot more about the White Devil and Soul Collector murders in London than he’d disclosed in his book or newspaper columns, and Sebastian had read them all. It could also therefore be expected that he knew plenty about Karen Oaten’s disappearance, as well as Monsieur Hexie’s death. After all, why had he run from the state troopers up in Maine? Why had he still not come forward?

  But right now, Peter Sebastian had other problems to deal with. The first was the pressure he was getting from the CIA. He’d been tapped by the Agency when he was in the Bureau’s Puerto Rico field office. They wanted him to keep them advised on his activities. If he hadn’t got himself in a mess with the wife of a local banker who worked for a drug gang, he’d have told them to suck their own dicks. As it was, the monthly deposit had been a big help over the past twenty years. And it wasn’t as if the Agency had ever put him in a tight spot. Until now. They had an even bigger hard-on for Matt Wells than he did. He was beginning to wonder why. Could the disappearances of Karen Oaten and Wells have something to do with his number-two employer? The implications of that thought were making him jumpy. The CIA had a history of going to bed with people you wouldn’t want your mother to meet.

  Then there was Special Agent Dana Maltravers. He had picked his assistant with extreme care. Her record was spectacular-law and criminology at Columbia, a Yale MBA, top of her intake at Quantico and a four-year posting at the Miami field office that had her superiors singing “Halleluiah.” Even when her brother committed suicide by jumping from his thirtieth-floor apartment in New York a couple of years back, she hadn’t let him down. Until now. It wasn’t just that she’d been incommunicado for two hours yesterday. She’d claimed her cell-phone battery was playing up, but he knew how unlikely that was-Dana was the kind of person who never had technical problems. No, she’d been strange ever since they got involved with the D.C. murders. He couldn’t believe she was just squeamish. In the violent-crimes team, they’d seen the worst that America’s sickos could offer, from skinned corpses in a Utah mining shack to piles of heads in a hacienda in New Mexico. By those standards, the occult killer was a pussycat.

  Sebastian looked at his notes again. There were things he couldn’t do till the other agents got in, like check on Harry Slater’s Hate Crimes-he had passed them the details of all three murders. And he needed to push the document analysis about the drawings-those squares and rectangles weren’t just random doodles, he was sure of that. He called up the three patterns of shapes on his screen once more. They meant something, either singly or in conjunction with each other. He moved them around, trying to make a coherent design, but again got nowhere.

  Then his cell phone rang. He identified himself and listened, his jaw dropping. Some asshole captain in the New York State Police had waited until the operation was well under way to inform him that Matt Wells was being arrested.

  The evening had gotten cold. Outside the office building in central Washington, Richard Bonhoff shivered. He was used to winters in Iowa, but there he always made sure to wear the right clothes. Right now, he wished he had bought another sweater and a woolly hat rather than the useless Redskins cap. At least it had shielded him from Lister successfully, though he wasn’t sure that would happen again when the newspaperman reappeared. He looked at his watch. Over an hour had passed.

  He had been thinking about the three people who had gone up in the elevator. The fifth floor was taken up by the offices of a partnership of lawyers. Richard had decided against following them up. He’d have stuck out even more among the sharks in suits than he did already. Then again, Gordy Lister’s appearance-leather jacket and cowboy boots-didn’t exactly conform. The woman in her plain suit was more like it, but she was young-he reckoned she couldn’t be much more than thirty. Maybe she was a call girl whose job it was to service Lister and the tall man.

  Richard shook his head. There was more to the woman than that. She was attractive enough to be a hooker, but too serious. The same went for the older guy-he wasn’t out for a sexual jaunt. His eyes had strayed toward Richard once and they had made him avert his gaze immediately: they were pale blue and ice-cold. Who was the guy? He didn’t look much like a lawyer, either.

  Then it struck him that the three might go their separate ways when they came out. Which would he tail? Lister was the one who knew about the twins, but he didn’t seem to be giving the orders. He didn’t know anything about the woman. That left the tall man. Yes, he was the one, Richard decided. He’d wasted enough time with Gordy Lister. He fingered the screwdriver he’d bought earlier. As a weapon, it was better than nothing and, when he was young, he’d been trained how to kill with whatever was to hand. His gut flipped. He thought of the twins and pressed his lips together. He was ready to do what it took to get them back.

  Twenty minutes later, the woman came out. She looked up and down the street before walking away to the left. Richard was in a darkened doorway, so she didn’t spot him. A few minutes afterward, Gordy Lister appeared. He headed to the right, his head down. Richard’s heart started to pound. The tall man was next.

  He finished buttoning his coat, then adjusted his hat. He didn’t pay any attention to the street, concentrating on taking a cigarette from a silver case and firing up with a matching lighter. Richard was struck by how self-assured the man looked, as if he owned the place. Maybe he did. After inhaling deeply several times, he strode away to the left. Richard gave him fifteen seconds, then slipped out of the doorway. He stayed on the opposite side of the road, his head bowed.

  The tall man turned left at the next junction and walked with measured, long strides, never looking round. After he took another turn, Richard realized he was heading for the lot that Lister used. That was bad news. Once he’d got into his car, the tail would be over. Richard slowed down, wondering what to do. The best he could come up with was to continue tailing the guy. Maybe he would meet someone, or make a call that gave something away. He knew he was clutching at straws. This was bullshit. He should have gone to the cops. Tomorrow he would do that. He needed professional help.

  The man dropped his cigarette outside the parking lot entrance and crushed the butt with a highly polished shoe. He still didn’t look around. It struck Richard, out-of-towner that he was, that this guy wasn’t exactly streetwise. A stoned mugger could have crept up on him. Richard timed another fifteen seconds and then followed. He was in luck. The tall man was still on street-level, moving toward the far corner of the parking area. Now it was easy. Richard bent over and used the vehicles to shield his approach. His target was standing next to a top-of-the-line BMW.

  Richard got to within ten yards and was behind a dark blue Japanese SUV when he felt cold steel on the back of his neck.

  “Hands on the floor.” The voice was low and menacing. Strong fingers gripped his body and he realized that there was more than one man to deal with. The screwdriver was taken from his pocket and tossed away.

  “That’s it,” said a second voice gruffly. “Get up, asshole.”

  Richard raised himself slowly, preparing to go into action as soon as the barrel moved away even slightly. Then he felt a sharp pain in his lower back.

  “We heard what you did last time,” the first man said. “We aren’t scared of ex-marines, pal. In case you’re wondering, this is a combat knife and I’ve used it to gut twelve people.”

  Richard knew immediately that the man was telling the truth. He let himself go slack. Then he took a heavy blow to the head and crashed to the concrete. The last thing he knew was another hit. It cracked his skull from one side to the other.

  The twins hadn�
��t died in the wreckage of the Italian sports car in the Catskills back in 1972. They instead watched as two unconscious young people of matching gender and build were taken from an eighteen-wheeler loaded with lumber. Their bodies were doused with petrol and then the car pushed through the crash barrier by the lumber truck. Men were already waiting in the gorge below to check that the bodies were burned beyond recognition. The twins climbed into the rig and went on to their new lives.

  In later years they sometimes talked about whether their deaths had really been necessary. Larry, as the male now called himself, tended to think they’d been overcautious, but reinventing himself as a rich man’s son from Colorado had given him the opportunity for much creative thinking. His sister, now Jane, was less concerned with external appearances. She spent most of her time in the lab, developing drugs and treatments that brought in millions and had impressed several government agencies. Of course, their father would have been impressed by their daring and their subsequent achievements. They hadn’t told the old man that they were going to start their lives again, so he had been forced to mourn their deaths before facing his own. It wasn’t in them to regret his passing.

  The twins trusted each other implicitly. Indeed, their interests were closely connected, both intellectually and businesswise. But they didn’t often meet. They didn’t feel any danger of their true identities being uncovered, even though there were people in the country’s deep establishment, those who had real power in their adopted country, who were aware of what had happened in the Catskills. Rather, the twins felt at ease living apart. They met once a year, each time in a different place. Other than that, they spent their time in their chosen locations-Jane in her research facility in northern New England, Larry close to the seat of power in Washington, D.C.

  Even the events of recent weeks hadn’t brought about any change in the twins’ activities. It would take more than a breach of security and the deaths of some insignificant people to worry them.