The figure, which I now see is dressed completely in black, levels a compact machine-pistol at me and empties the magazine in a burst of sound. My dive behind the kitchen bar saves me, though I feel a heavy blow on one of legs. Then I see a round object bounce off the surface of the bar and drop by my legs. Grenade. I grab it and toss it back. There is a loud explosion and more dust comes over me in a wave. My ears are ringing. All I know is that my lover is in the bedroom and at least one of the intruders will also be there by now. I grab my blade and go round the end of the bar. A badly mutilated body is motionless on the floor. I don’t waste time with the helmet and keep going.
But before I reach my bedroom door, a figure in black backs out, hands in the air. When the point of the swordstick pierces the leather biker’s jacket, the intruder stops abruptly. I look beyond and see my blonde lover. She’s naked and is holding a a ridiculously small pair of nail scissors.
I stare at her, my hearing gradually returning.
“What’s that, Matt?” she asks, catching sight of my blade.
“I could ask you the same question.” I slip the catch from the strap on the figure’s neck and wrestle the helmet off. The intruder is a shaven-headed black man whom I don’t recognize. I hear police sirens coming near. The occupants of my block aren’t used to explosions at night.
“Watch him,” I say to my lover. I go back to the prone figure and pull off the helmet. Another man, this one white and very dead.
“Who put you on us?” I shout to the other guy.
He doesn’t reply. I know he won’t ever reply. The Soul Collector will have made very clear what she’ll do to his family if he talks. She’ll also have deposited a large sum in a secret account for when he gets out of jail.
Afterward, when the police have finally gone, I sit with my arm around my lover’s shoulders. We’re drinking twelve-year-old malt whiskey, but it isn’t doing much to fill the emptiness we’re feeling. Sara Robbins will never let us live an ordinary life. Sooner or later I’ll have to get her off my back for good.
Although my ears are still ringing, I can hear the seagull knocking from time to time on the spare bedroom window.
Death has flown away by night. But I know she’ll be back….
When I came round, I insisted that I do some more driving. I’d had enough of what my memory had been dredging up, not least because I couldn’t be sure how much of it to believe. I preferred to concentrate on the road.
Mary fell asleep and I carried on southward. I didn’t know how long she was out.
“Where are we?” she said, yawning.
“Southern New York, not too far from New Jersey. I just saw a sign to West Point.”
She smiled. “Did that mean anything to you, Mr. Englishman?”
Strangely enough, it did—one of the seemingly irrelevant pieces of knowledge my haphazard memory had clung on to. I must have watched too many trashy war films.
“Listen, Matt,” Mary said, “you really need to get some sleep.”
I nodded. My arms were tight and I was having trouble keeping my eyes open.
“It’ll be dark in an hour or so. We should be able to find an out-of-the-way motel.” She smiled at me. “We can make an early start in the morning.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I said. “I can hitch to Washington from here easily enough. You should get back to Sparta.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “No, thanks. I’ve had enough shit from the law.”
That caught my attention. “Really? That sounds a bit unusual for a primary schoolteacher.”
Mary shot me a chilly look. “Curiosity killed the cat and all her kittens, Matt.”
“Pardon me. I was just trying to get to know you better.”
“And what would be the point of that?” she demanded. “You’re making it very clear that you don’t want me around.”
I sighed. “It isn’t that, Mary. This is going to get dangerous.”
“Like it hasn’t been already. Those weren’t blanks Stu was firing at us.”
“All right, all right,” I said, raising a hand. “We’ll talk about it when we stop.”
An uneasy silence prevailed. It was Mary who broke it.
“If you must know, those Texan assholes weren’t the first men to take me around the back of the houses.” She kept her eyes away from mine.
I recalled what Mary’s mother had said about her daughter’s emotional fragility.
“I’m…I’m not good at…at relationships,” she said. “But sometimes I have…needs. I go to the bar and get hit on. I like it till it gets to the point where I have to…I have to get to it…then I can’t go through with it.” She let out a long sob.
I stretched out my hand, but all that did was make her cry even more desperately.
“You see?” she stammered. “You’re no different from the others. I suppose you think I’m just some screwed-up neurotic.”
I touched her shoulder. “No, I don’t. I couldn’t have got away without your help. Why should I have negative thoughts about you?” I framed what I said as carefully as I could. “Look, we need to break the journey. Let’s find somewhere to sleep soon. We’ll both feel better in the morning. Then we can decide what we’re going to do.”
The sobbing stopped and Mary looked across at me, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She smiled weakly. “Thank you, Matt. I knew as soon as I saw you that you were different from the others.”
I couldn’t argue with that. It would have been amazing if she’d ever encountered a partial amnesiac toting an assault rifle and two Glocks before. But I needed to be careful and not encourage her too much.
There was a sign for a motel not long afterward. The place was set back from the road with dense trees to the rear and not many vehicles parked outside.
“You’d better stay here,” Mary said, rummaging in her bag. “I’ll see if they can live without ID and pay in advance by cash.”
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, Mat
t,” 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 incommuni
cado 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.
Maps of Hell Page 19
