3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Tell me about Emma.”

  Sharon confounded Jack utterly when he returned to the house.

  “I have an idea,” she said brightly, “why don’t you and Alli spend the night here? Alli can have the spare bedroom, and this sofa is very comfortable. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve fallen asleep on it.”

  Jack, mindful of the Secret Service detail he’d left behind, his brain turning over the problem of how once and for all to track down Ronnie Kray, heedlessly said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  Sharon’s face fell. “But why not?”

  Seeing her stricken face gave him pause. He saw her on the sofa next to Alli, both women, torsos twisted, turned toward him. It was their proximity to each other, as if they were intimates, as if they had been talking of intimate things when he walked in. There was something about Sharon’s face, an expression he felt certain he’d never see again.

  “It would be so nice,” Sharon said, “all of us together.”

  Jack, his mind changing gears, thought she might be right. “Why don’t we all go to my house? It’s larger and—”

  Seeing the change come over Sharon’s face, he stopped in midsentence.

  “Jack, come on. You know that house gives me the creeps.”

  What was the use? he thought. No matter what he said, she’d never agree to go there, let alone spend the night.

  “Alli and I have to go,” he said.

  Sharon stood up. “Why, Jack? I know you’re not comfortable here, but just this once, stay here with me.”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s impossible, Shar. Alli’s Secret Service detail is expecting her to be at the house.”

  “You mean you deliberately ditched them to bring her here?” The sabers were rattling again, the warhorse stamping its huge hooves.

  “It was necessary,” Jack said.

  “As far as you’re concerned, it’s always necessary to break the rules.”

  “Not always.” How easy it was to fall back into the old patterns. “Sometimes I bend them.”

  “Stop, please!” Alli cried.

  They both turned in her direction.

  “This isn’t anything to fight about,” she said. “You’re just fighting for the sake of fighting.”

  “Alli’s right,” Sharon said. “Half the time I don’t even remember what we’re fighting about.”

  “Then come with us,” Jack said. “Spend the night.”

  “I’d like to,” Sharon said. “Really I would.” She shook her head. “But I’m not ready, Jack. Can you understand that?”

  “Sure,” he said, though he didn’t, not really. If it wasn’t for the Secret Service detail, he would have consented to stay here tonight. What was it about Gus’s house she despised so? He couldn’t work it out. He’d asked her so many times without getting a satisfactory answer, he had no desire to go over that old turf again. Besides, like her, he was sick to death of fighting.

  “I guess it’s time for you to go, then.” Sharon embraced Alli, and they kissed. She stood in the lighted doorway, watching them as they went down the walk to Jack’s car, and she shivered, as if with a premonition, or a feeling of déjà vu, as if she’d experienced this helpless moment of sadness and loss before.

  43

  There was, no question, a certain gloom about Jack’s house, a fustiness manifested by huge odd-shaped rooms, old gas lamps gutted and wired for electricity, massive furniture, not a stick of it built after 1950. Perhaps it was all this Sharon objected to, why she had opted for predictable square rooms, low ceilings, modern furniture—a house gaily lighted but without charm.

  But there was also history here—chaotic, warty, fascinating. It was, as Alli had recognized, the residence of an Outsider, past and present. Could that be why Emma liked it here and Sharon didn’t? Jack asked himself as he climbed up the stairs with Alli. Sharon wasn’t an Outsider—that kind of life, often in conflict with rules, regulations, even, sometimes, the law, both baffled and frightened her. She was comfortable only within the well-defined bounds of society. That was why she’d been so hell-bent on Emma going to Langley Fields, which was so Establishment. And it was why Emma had gotten into continuous difficulty there. A round peg in a square hole. Outsiders never fit in; you could never change them. But until the day Emma died Sharon hadn’t given up hope.

  Jack showed Alli into the guest room, which was next to his. In all these years, he’d never been able to sleep in Gus’s bedroom. Years ago, he’d hauled the bed Gus had been murdered in out back and burned it. More recently, he’d turned the bedroom into a media room with an enormous flat-screen TV on which he watched James Brown concerts as well as baseball and films he bought on DVD. He felt certain Gus would’ve liked that.

  “The bathroom’s fully stocked,” he said. “But if there’s anything else you need, it’ll be in this closet here.”

  After they said good night, he watched her go into her room, close the door behind her. He thought about what might be going on in her head, all the things she had told him, all the things she hadn’t. In his room, he called Carson, told him all was well and that he was slowly making progress.

  Jack turned off the light, lay on the bed with his clothes on. He felt bone-weary, sad unto death. The experience of learning about Emma’s secret life was a two-edged sword. Gratitude and remorse flooded him in equal measure. Tonight he felt an outsider even from himself.

  He must have fallen asleep because suddenly he opened his eyes and knew time had passed. It was the middle of the night. Traffic sounds were as scarce as clouds in the horse latitudes. He felt that he lay on the bosom of the ocean, rocked gently by wave after wave. He was aware of an abyss beneath him, vast, lightless. Light filtering in through the window seemed like the cool pinpoints of ten million stars. He was as far from civilization as he had ever been. Unmoored, he had said. And Alli had said, I’m unmoored, too.

  It was then that he heard a sound, like the wind sighing through branches, like moonlight singing in the trees. Rain pattered on the roof, and a voice whispered, “There’s someone in the house.”

  Sitting up, Jack saw a slim figure silhouetted in the open doorway.

  “Alli, what is it? What did you hear?”

  “There’s someone in the house,” she whispered.

  He rose, took his Glock and went toward her. She turned, retreated into the hall, as if to show the way. Shadows lay against the wall like wounded soldiers. The silence was palpable, even the house’s normal creaks and groans were for the moment stilled.

  “Alli, where are you going?” he whispered at the receding figure. “I want you to go back to your room, lock the door till I come for you.”

  But either she was too far away or chose to ignore his warning, because she went down the stairs. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her. A strange form of peacefulness came over him as he followed the slip of a shadow down the hallway, through the dining room and kitchen. Off the kitchen was a pantry that Gus had used for a storeroom and a half bath situated between the kitchen and the mudroom.

  The mudroom was a space that was never used, either by Gus or by Jack. It seemed the oldest part of the house mostly because of its chronic disuse. It hadn’t been painted for years. There were cobwebs in the corners with the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable insects who’d met their end in their sticky strands. An old chair rail hung half off the wall, and an old-fashioned wooden hat rack leaned drowsily in one corner. The floor was constructed of ancient slate tiles, eighteen inches on a side. Many were cracked, some fractured entirely. One or two were missing.

  As Jack crossed the kitchen, he could see Alli unlock the back door, disappear outside. Jack followed her. At once, he was engulfed by the odors of rotting wood, roots, and the mineral tang of damp stone. He pushed through into a deeper darkness as he moved into a patch of the forested area behind the house.

  “Alli,” he said softly. “Alli, enough. Where are you?”


  The tangle of branches, dense even in the dead of winter, kept the city at bay. The sky, grayish pink like old skin, was intermittently swept away by the wind. Rain seeped down, bouncing off twigs and vines, taking erratic pinball paths. Save for this, all was still. And yet there was the sense of something stirring, as if the wild area itself were alive with a single will, had turned that will to a specific intent.

  Jack, his anxiety rising, peered through the rain, through the Medusa’s hair of the thicket. It was impossible to know which way she’d gone, or even why she would lead him here. In and out of faint lozenges of city light he went, turning this way and that, searching, until he seemed to be in a maze of mirrors, where he kept coming upon his own reflection.

  He was certain he hadn’t dreamt that whisper, certain that Alli had been standing in his doorway. After all, who else could it have been? Then, the fine hairs on his forearms stirred, because he heard the voice again.

  “Dad …”

  Dennis Paull, climbing the open stairs of the Starlight Motel in Maryland, was nearing the end of another grueling day. Part of it had been taken up by a meeting with Calla Myers’s parents. He could, of course, have had one of his assistants meet them, but he was not one for delegating difficult assignments. Calla Myers had been killed on his watch. There was no excuse for her death; its dark stain would be etched on his soul forever, to take its place alongside many other similar tattoos. But somehow this one seemed darker, deeper, more shameful, because she was a civilian. She hadn’t put herself in harm’s way as the two Secret Service agents had. That she’d been murdered in precisely the same way as the agents was no longer a mystery to him.

  Paull had no illusions about going to heaven, but since he believed in neither heaven nor hell, it didn’t really matter. What concerned him was the here and now. He had conjured up all the right phrases of sympathy for the Myerses. He had even sat with them afterwards, while the mother wept and the father held her blindly, even after he’d run out of words of brittle solace. He tried not to think about his own wife, his two sons, tried not to wonder how he would react if someone came to him with unthinkable news. He’d had a brother who’d died in the Horn of Africa in the service of his country. Even Paull hadn’t known the details of his mission. Nor had he cared to know the details of his death. He’d simply buried him with full honors and gone on with his work.

  Having checked three times for surveillance, Paull walked along the open gangway on the second floor of the motel, inserted a key in the lock of a room at the far end, opened the door, and went in.

  Nina Miller was sitting on the bed, her long legs stretched out, crossed at the bare ankles. She’d kicked off her sensible shoes and now looked fetching in a pearl-white silk shirt. Her dove gray wool skirt had ridden partway up her muscular thighs. She was a fine tennis player, as was Paull. It was how they’d met, in fact. Now they played mixed doubles whenever they had a chance, which, admittedly, wasn’t often.

  Nina put down the book she was reading—Summer Rain, by Marguerite Duras—a first edition Paull had given her last year for her birthday. It was her favorite novel.

  “You’re looking luscious.”

  She smiled. “I could have your job for workplace sexual harassment.”

  “This isn’t the workplace.” Paull bent, kissed her on the lips. “This isn’t harassment.”

  “Flatterer.”

  Paull pulled over the desk chair, sat down beside her. “What have you got for me?”

  She handed him a thick manila folder. “I back-checked the dossiers of every member of the D.C. Homeland Security office. Everyone’s clean, so far as I can tell, except for Garner.”

  “Hugh’s my deputy.” Paull shook his head. “No. He’s too obvious a choice.”

  “That’s precisely why the National Security Advisor recruited him.” She pointed at the open file she’d compiled. “Over the past eight months, Hugh has met five times with a man named Smith.” She laughed. “Can you believe it? Anyway, Mr. Smith is Hugh’s acupuncturist. He also happens to be in the office adjacent to the National Security Advisor’s chiropractor.”

  Paull, paging through the file, said, “I see their appointments overlapped on those five occasions.”

  Nina folded her hands in her lap. “What d’you want to do?”

  Putting the folder aside, Paull leaned over her. “I know what I want to do.”

  Nina giggled, took his head between her hands. “I’m serious.”

  “I couldn’t be more serious.” His lips brushed the hollow of her throat. “How’s your friend Jack McClure?”

  “Mmmm.”

  Paull raised his head. “What does that mean?”

  She made a moue. “You’re not jealous, are you, Denny?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She pushed him away. “Sometimes you can be so starchy.”

  “I only meant that considering Hugh Garner hates McClure’s guts, perhaps between us we can work out a way for him to take care of Hugh for us.”

  Her mouth twitched. “What a Machiavellian mind you have.”

  Paull laughed appreciatively as he manipulated the tiny pearl buttons down the front of her shirt.

  Tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, she said, “I’ve gotten as close as I can to Jack. He’s carrying a Statue of Liberty-size torch for his ex.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Nothing you’ll have to worry about,” she said. “You don’t have a heart.”

  “Birds of a feather.” He made a lascivious grab for her. “Anyway, what could be better than an affair with no strings attached?”

  “I can’t imagine.” She gripped his tie, pulled him down to her.

  Jack turned and saw her, framed between two trees, her skin pale in the ghostly light.

  “Dad …”

  “Emma?” He took a step toward her. “Is that you?”

  The rain, gaining strength, beat down on him, water rolling into his eyes, mixing with his tears. Could Emma have come back to him? Was it possible? Or was he losing his mind?

  He moved closer. The image wavered, seemed to break up into a million parts, each reflected in a raindrop spattering black branches, glistening brown bark, pale gold of dead leaves. She was all around him.

  Jack stood in wonder as he heard her voice, “Dad, I’m here….”

  It wasn’t the voice of a person or a ghost. It was the sough of the wind, the scrape of the branches, the rustle of the brittle leaves, even the distant intermittent hiss of traffic on faraway streets, avenues, and parkways.

  “I’m here….”

  Her voice emanated from everything. Every atom held a part of her, was infused by her spirit, her soul, the electrical spark that had animated her brain, that made her unique, that made her Emma.

  “My Emma.” He listened for her, to her, heard the wind, the trees, the sky, even the dead leaves call his name, felt her close all around him, as if he were immersed in warm water. “Emma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry….”

  “I’m here, Dad…. I’m here.”

  And she was. Though he couldn’t hold her, couldn’t see her, she was there with him, not a figment of his imagination, but something beyond his ken, beyond a human’s ability to comprehend. A physicist might call her a quark. Werner Heisenberg, architect of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, would understand her being here and not here at the same time.

  Jack returned to the house dripping wet, feeling at once exceptionally calm and subtly agitated. He couldn’t explain the feeling any more than he could the last half hour, nor did he want to. Heavy-limbed, he wanted only to return to his bed and sleep for as many hours as he could until sunlight splintered the oak tree outside his window and roused him with warm and tender fingers.

  Before he did so, however, he peeked into Alli’s room, saw her sleeping peacefully on her side. Silently closing the door, he tiptoed back to the bathroom to dry off. Then he stumbled into bed and, after pulling the covers up
to his chin, passed into a deep and untroubled sleep.

  44

  Jack felt as if he were walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he had promised Edward Carson to deliver Alli at noon today; on the other, he needed to find some way to get Alli to open up about Ian Brady because she was his only link to him. She’d been with him long enough; it was possible she had seen or heard something that could lead him to the murderer.

  “Alli, I know how hard this must be for you,” he said as she came down to the kitchen, “I know this man is scary.”

  Instantly, she turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He ignored the deer-caught-in-the-headlights glassiness of her eyes, plowed relentlessly on. This might be his last chance to get her to talk about her ordeal. “Alli, listen to me, we need to know why Kray abducted you. He didn’t do it for a lark, he had a plan in mind. Only you and he know what that is. You’re the key to what happened.”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “But have you tried?” Jack said. “Really tried?”

  “Please, Jack.” She began to tremble all over, absolutely certain that she was close to something terrible, that she was approaching a pit of fire into which she could not help but walk and be consumed. Even Jack couldn’t save her now. “Please stop.”

  “Alli, I’m sure Emma would want you to—”

  “Don’t!” She spun around, her face flushed. “Don’t use Emma that way.”

  “All right.” Jack held up his hands. He knew he’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” The more he pushed her, the more agitated she became. He wasn’t going to get anything more out of her this way or any other way he could think of. Like it or not, he had to back off.

  He smiled at her. “Are we good?”