With hookers, the risk of getting caught was minimal. Dealing with pros meant dealing with people who, like himself, spent their days and nights on the fringes of accepted society. Their pimps would miss them, but that would be it. There would likely be no worried husbands or boyfriends to report them missing, no concerned coworkers to alert the authorities when they didn’t report to the office Monday morning.
They would simply vanish.
So that was it, then. He would take a walk tonight and let the visions lead him to the perfect victim. The visions would be there to guide him. They always were.
CHAPTER 10
Thirty years ago
Everett, Massachusetts
The sun had by now descended below the horizon, and the room was enveloped in a gloom Robert thought most appropriate for the occasion. Virginia dozed and Robert sat next to her, holding their children, one in each arm, fighting a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. What should have been one of the happiest days of his life was turning into one of the most horrifying.
“Dr. Jones” had departed, collecting his fee in cash as previously agreed upon and promising to stop by tomorrow to look in on Virginia. By then the babies would be gone, not that Dr. Jones would care one way or the other. He had been contracted to provide medical services to Virginia Ayers during the delivery, and that was all. The infants were not a part of that contract and thus not Dr. Jones’s concern.
Virginia had refused to hold either of the babies when offered. She simply moaned softly and rolled onto her side, refusing to answer Robert’s questions, refusing even to meet his eyes. Eventually she had slipped into a restless slumber.
The doorbell rang and Robert sat up with a start, shocked to discover he too had fallen asleep. How he had managed that feat while holding two newborn babies he did not know, but he felt fortunate not to have dropped either of them. “Christ,” he mumbled disgustedly, “maybe it’s a good thing we have to give them away.” Then he glanced at his children and immediately changed his mind.
He stood and turned toward the front of the house, stopping to glance at Virginia before leaving the room. He was surprised to see her staring steadily back at him. “It’s time,” Robert said simply, and she nodded. “Would you like to…”
“No,” she interrupted. “I don’t want to say good-bye to them. I can’t bear to do it. I’m sorry to put this on you, my love, but could you please handle this?”
Robert looked at the floor and scuffed the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “Of course.”
He left the bedroom and trudged through the small house. He thought he now knew how an inmate might feel making the walk to the gas chamber. He stopped and took a deep, shaking breath. Opened the door. On the landing stood a stranger dressed head to toe in black. Black watch cap, black trench coat, black trousers and shoes. The man even wore a solid black necktie over a black Oxford shirt.
The stranger eyed Robert for a long moment, not speaking. Then he inclined his head at the babies. “Are they ready?”
Robert nodded. “Come in,” he said.
The stranger—Robert didn’t know his name and didn’t want to know—entered without another word. Next to the door sat a small duffel bag, packed earlier in the evening. Inside it were two outfits for each infant, a small supply of diapers and baby formula, and a pair of blankets, all items that had been agreed upon weeks ago.
Robert picked up the bag and handed it to the stranger, who hesitated a moment. It seemed as though the man wanted to say something, but decided against it. The stranger shrugged and carried the bag to a car idling at the end of the driveway. He dumped the bag into the trunk.
A darkness unlike anything he had ever felt filled Robert’s heart. He had never seen the man in black before and knew he would never see him again. He knew nothing about the stranger, only that he was to hand over his two children, his own flesh and blood, to the man and allow the man to disappear with them forever.
He couldn’t do it.
He wouldn’t do it.
CHAPTER 11
Cait leaned back in her seat and tried to relax as the half-empty airplane carved the sky northbound over the Atlantic coast. Kevin dozed next to her, as did most of the other passengers on the late-night flight, but Cait was far too keyed up to sleep. She was on her way—hopefully—to meet her biological mother, and it was all she could think about.
After a lifetime of wondering where she came from and who she was, and having resigned herself years ago to never learning her personal history, the speed with which the investigator, Arlen Hirschberg, had uncovered the clues to her past was astonishing. It took less than a week for Hirschberg to determine that she had been born June 15, 1983, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, to a young couple named Robert and Virginia Ayers.
There was no record of the birth in any of the local hospitals—not surprising, Hirschberg said, given the Ayers’s subsequent release of the infant into the illegal baby market—so it was reasonable to assume she had been born inside the Ayers home. Tiny Caitlyn had spent just a few hours in her birthplace before being spirited away in the middle of the night by a nameless representative of a faceless black market adoption ring.
She had been raised by a young married couple living outside Tampa and had grown up on the west coast of Florida, wondering Why? every time she thought about her biological parents. It was not that she didn’t love and appreciate her adoptive family. Margery and Walt Connelly had showered her with love and attention, raising a strong and caring young woman. To Caitlyn, they would always be her real parents, and both had gone to their graves knowing how much they were loved by their only child.
But none of that changed the fact that Caitlyn Connelly needed to plug the hole she felt in her heart every time one of her friends would say something like, “Oh, my grandfather came over from Verona, Italy, in 1935, and started his own plumbing business.” Caitlyn wanted—needed—to be able to relate her own family history. She wanted—needed—to understand where her own grandfather had come from and what he had done for work. Was he a plumber, carpenter, doctor, lawyer?
For all of the excitement she felt as the airplane hummed its way north, though, Cait knew there was every possibility this trip would end in disappointment. Arlen Hirschberg had contacted Cait’s birth mother, Virginia Ayers, now widowed and in ill health, living in her longtime home outside Boston, and the woman had flatly refused to see her daughter. According to the investigator, she was shocked at being tracked down after all this time and had seemed somehow frightened at the prospect of meeting her now thirty-year-old child.
Caitlyn knew how she felt. The idea of seeing the woman who had given her up so long ago caused a snake made of nerves and fear to twist through her belly, and she knew that snake would never slither away as long as the questions she had been carrying around for so long remained unasked.
So, despite the fact that Virginia Ayers had turned down Hirschberg’s request for a face-to-face meeting, Cait and Kevin bought the cheapest red-eye tickets they could find to Boston, determined to see the woman in person and convince her to share just a few minutes of her time.
Cait didn’t intend to bully the woman. She just had to know.
She gazed out the tiny window, watching the lights blink on the tips of the wings as they swayed hypnotically, buffeted by the wind resistance created by an aluminum tube shooting through the air at hundreds of miles per hour. Cait tried to imagine the circumstances that might have forced her mother to abandon her. Her fantasy had always been of a young teen, pregnant and terrified, the father unwilling or unable to support her, hiding her pregnancy in shame and then ridding herself of her baby immediately following its birth.
But she knew now that fantasy was far from accurate. Hirschberg said she had been born to a married couple. Maybe there was mental illness involved—that certainly seemed possible, given the existence of the Flickers Cait had experienced her entire life—or maybe her parents had been on the run, fleeing some unknown th
reat, unwilling to subject their newborn baby to the danger in their lives.
Cait sighed. She was being ridiculous and she knew it. Her birth mother hadn’t been fleeing from some shadowy Hollywood B-movie assassin. Virginia Ayers had lived in the same area, under the same name, for decades, maybe for her whole life. The reality of the situation was clearly different than anything Cait had spent a lifetime imagining, so it was pointless to speculate. Better to simply wait for the meeting, pray she could convince the woman to talk to her, and then try to get as much of the full story as possible.
But relaxing was out of the question. Kevin snored softly next to her and then without warning the Flickers began, crashing into her brain like an out-of-control freight train. Her head jerked once, almost imperceptibly, as it always did when the Flickers began, and then the images invaded her mind, random scenes of random people, all of whom were sitting quietly on this airplane.
A little girl hugged her stuffed bear close to her chest as she tried to sleep. She had to go to the bathroom but was trying to ignore it because she didn’t want to wake her sleeping mother.
A man experiencing money problems could not stop worrying how in the hell he was going to make his next mortgage payment, and how long he might be able to stall foreclosure when that payment was missed, as he knew it inevitably would be.
A young woman, newly engaged, was traveling to meet her fianc’s parents for the first time, nervous about the meeting and fearing she was making a mistake. She worried that she didn’t truly love her husband-to-be, and that he wasn’t the one for her. Should she back out of the wedding, and if so, how would she tell her fiancé?
Cait reached over and took Kevin’s hand gently in hers. It was large and it enveloped her smaller one like a big, warm glove. His eyes blinked open and he looked up at her sleepily. He squeezed her hand once and then dozed off again. She had told him she could make the trip herself, that it wasn’t necessary for him to babysit her, that she was a big girl and could handle meeting her mother alone, but he had just smiled and nodded and gotten the time off from work anyway. “You don’t get to have all the fun,” he had said. “I could use a little mini-vacation, too.”
But Cait knew why he had really tagged along. He was afraid that she would arrive at Virginia Ayers’s home and the woman would simply send her away, or, worse, she would agree to talk but would be caustic and nasty, and Cait would be devastated. He was coming along because he wanted to be there in case it became necessary to pick up the pieces.
Cait wondered what she had done to deserve Kevin. How had she gotten so lucky? She knew there was nothing so horrible in the world that you couldn’t face it head-on if you had the right partner. And she had the right partner.
Outside, the lights on the wing continued to wink, the plane moving steadily north over the dark ocean far below, vast and silent and ghostly. The Flickers continued for a while longer, flashing into Cait Connelly’s brain at random intervals, imprinting themselves on her consciousness and then disappearing like scenes picked up by a flashbulb popping in a dark room.
They didn’t bother Cait. Not really. She was used to them.
CHAPTER 12
The problem with hunting at night in the neighborhoods Milo liked to frequent was that there were too damned many potential victims. In addition to the usual suspects—prostitutes, pimps, gang members, petty criminals—there were always plenty of clueless ordinary citizens who somehow felt comfortable walking the streets of a dangerous city alone after dark.
These fools were the people Milo tried his best to stay away from. He wasn’t always successful, but he tried. Ordinary citizens were the ones most likely to cause problems when they vanished. They were the ones with money, with pull, with worried families only too willing to make tearful appearances on the TV news and beg for their loved one’s return. Their cases were the ones the police spent most of their time and efforts trying to solve, and therefore Milo considered them, with rare exceptions, off limits.
Milo was much more interested in the hunt and in the subsequent pleasure he could get out of his victim than in any cat-and-mouse game he might play with the authorities. He wanted to satisfy his cravings in anonymity, not have to spend precious time and effort avoiding capture. That goal had vanished when Carrie Collins of Channel Seven news had coined the term, “Mr. Midnight,” but it was nevertheless still good practice to stay away from publicity. To that end, the people of the night—lost souls similar to himself—made much more logical targets.
And there were plenty of them.
Tonight, having decided upon a hooker as his prey, Milo took his time, stalking the streets patiently. A light drizzle cloaked the scene in an eerie glow, indistinct yellow halos surrounding the streetlights, making the city look more like nineteenth-century London than twenty-first-century Boston.
Cars cruised past, some low-slung and sporty, successful horny middle-aged businessmen with more money than sense out for taboo satisfaction, others boxy and utilitarian, less successful horny middle-aged businessmen out for their own taboo satisfaction. The parade seemed endless. Milo paid them little attention.
The girls, however, were a different story. His tastes weren’t overly particular, but if he was going to go to the trouble of selecting a companion, he wanted to take his time and do it right. There was no point grabbing the first girl he saw and then being disappointed; having to kill her and dump the body and then begin his search all over again.
So the girls he paid attention to. He wandered along the sidewalk, scrutinizing them as they stood in the shadows in groups of two and three. Most often they were bored, passing the time by chatting and joking with each other as they waited for potential customers. When a car containing a john drove by slowly and deliberately, the occupant’s intentions clear, the girls would emerge from the shadows like modern-day vampires, strutting and posturing, offering up the most favorable view of the merchandise.
Sometimes the car would pull to the curb and stop, the driver rolling down a window, chatting nervously with his favorite, negotiating terms. Other times the car would accelerate away, the shopper unimpressed, continuing his search elsewhere, and the girls would retreat into the alley or doorway, resuming their wait for the next potential customer. They never had to wait long.
Milo glided through the night, haunting the streets, occasionally catching a vision as he passed the hookers. Here was an aging pro, prematurely hardened by years on the street, worried about getting beaten by her pimp—again—because her earnings were slipping.
Here was a younger girl, prettier and less hardened but still a veteran of several years, snapping gum, strutting for customers, but in her mind thinking she was going to have to take the next few days off. She felt bloated. Her period was about to start, and that was exactly what she didn’t need. Taking time off would cut into her income stream. She was pissed.
Milo continued, unimpressed with the pickings. He hated the visions, wished for the millionth time in his miserable life he could be a normal guy with a normal brain, unencumbered by the unending onslaught of mental pictures and snippets of the thoughts and conversations of strangers. Then maybe this compulsion to hunt and torture and kill would disappear. Maybe he could finally achieve some peace. Maybe.
But it didn’t matter, because it was never going to happen.
He rounded a corner and saw her. A pretty young thing, new to the game. You didn’t have to be the recipient of inexplicable mental images to see that. The girl stood off by herself, awkward and uncomfortable, differentiated from her peers by the approach she was taking to lure business. Her contemporaries were dressed as provocatively as possible, decked out in micro-minis, fishnet stockings, tight crop-tops, four-inch heels.
They looked like sluts, in other words, and why wouldn’t they? They were sluts. Professional sluts.
But this girl had taken a different approach. Her chestnut hair, straight and lush and shiny in the drizzle, was split into two long ponytails, cascading over h
er shoulders and down her back over a tight sweater. A short plaid skirt barely covered her ass, and long bare legs, adorned only with white striped knee socks worn over patent leather shoes, drew the eye like yesterday’s trash draws flies.
The schoolgirl look.
Most pros, especially low-rent ones like the girls in this neighborhood, simply couldn’t pull off the look. They were too old, or too hard, or too used up, and weren’t able to effect the look of innocent sexuality it required.
But this girl was different. There was no telling how long she could manage it—the girls around here hardened quickly and permanently—but for now her freshness was unmistakable, and a welcome counterpoint to the cynical carnal excess on display everywhere else.
She was the one.
He had to have her.
Milo approached as slowly as he could manage without drawing undue attention to himself. He had been moving at a leisurely pace before and now scuffled along even more deliberately, dragging his feet and doing his best to make it appear he was paying no attention to the schoolgirl when, in reality, his entire being was focused upon her.
He passed a convenience store, one of the franchises known for being open twenty-four-seven. Not this location. This place was closed up tight, the owners having apparently decided the convenience to customers of a twenty-four-hour operation was not worth the constant threat of armed robbery. Metal shutters, the kind that could be levered up inside a steel awning during business hours, covered the windows, preventing entry from anything short of a military assault vehicle.
In the store’s recessed entryway stood a cluster of girls, three of them, chirping to one another like birds on crack as they waited for business to pick up. Their conversation died off as Milo wandered past and they watched him with a suspicion that caught him by surprise. He was used to being ignored, not scrutinized. Somehow, concentrating so hard on the girl he wanted had made him more noticeable.
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