He replaced the map in the backpack and continued on his way, following the old blacktop all the way to the buildings. The first one he came to was so featureless he didn’t have a clue what it might originally have been designed to house; all he saw was the big rusting padlock on the windowless door.
Gabriel turned the heavy padlock up so he could see the bottom and knew from the amount of rust that his picks would be useless; a hammer and chisel, he thought, wouldn’t be able to cut through the years of rust.
“Hey, a little help here.”
Sorry. My mind wandered.
“Well, wander it back, will you? Lock. And not one I can pick without a chisel. Or maybe some C-4.”
Just a sec. Wait…There.
He heard the sharp click and found the padlock opening in his hand. It was still rusty and unwilling, but it opened.
“Still got the magic touch, Rox.”
Yeah, yeah. Check this place out and let’s leave.
“You getting antsy?”
I also don’t like it when somebody changes the rules. Be careful, Gabe. I have a bad feeling.
There were few things in the world Gabriel respected as much as his sister’s bad feelings, so he paused at the unlocked door long enough to get both a flashlight and a gun from his backpack. Then he put his shoulder to the door and forced his way into the derelict building.
Back in the conference room, Marc filled the others in on both the interview with Marie Goode and Dani’s experience.
“I don’t like this,” Hollis said.
“Which?” Paris demanded. “And join the club. Marc, I hope you don’t mean to leave Dani unguarded.”
“I don’t.”
Dani didn’t protest, just looked at Hollis and waited. She was trying very hard to pretend that she was unconcerned, that the slimy voice of a killer in her mind didn’t terrify her to her marrow, and knew all too well that at least two people in the room were perfectly aware of exactly what she was feeling.
Three, really, as Hollis’s words made clear.
“Having that sort of contact with evil is about as bad as it gets,” she said to Dani, her tone matter-of-fact even though there was sympathy in her expression. “Did the connection feel solid?”
Dani forced herself to think about it and finally shook her head. “Not really. As a matter of fact, it ended very abruptly.” When Marc said my name.
“You’ve never been telepathic,” Paris noted. “Even within an established connection, it’s more feelings than thoughts.”
Dani carefully avoided looking at Marc. “This was both—sort of. Cold, hard, complete sentences. But sort of like an echo.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember all the details of my vision dream; maybe this was just that, a leftover echo of something I hadn’t consciously remembered.”
Marc looked at Hollis, brows raised. “Possible?”
“Sure. It could also be possible that Dani’s abilities are evolving, or that either she or the killer somehow established a connection between them. Or…”
“Or what?” Marc demanded.
Dani knew what he was asking and also knew he didn’t want to suggest to Hollis—to anyone—that the killer might be psychic, as he had speculated. She was grateful when the other woman frowned and shook her head.
“Or…let me think about that for a while.”
“Do I have a choice?” Marc asked wryly.
“Not really.” She softened that with a smile, which quickly faded. “The other thing I don’t like is the increasing evidence that our killer is changing or has changed, fundamentally. Marie Goode is the right physical type, right age, right everything he likes. But to…make his interest in her so obvious strikes me as a completely new element. Letting her hear his camera, leaving the roses, and—” She frowned at Marc. “What about the necklace?”
“Shorty reported in as we were leaving my office. It looks like the necklace might be the one Becky Huntley was wearing when she disappeared. No prints. In fact, chemical traces show it was recently cleaned, with ammonia or one of those jewelry-cleaning solutions you can buy in any jewelry store. Description fits. Her parents will have to I.D. it to be sure.”
“Please don’t give me that job,” Jordan murmured.
“Harry’s going. Hollis, if it is Becky’s necklace, what does it say about this bastard? Leaving a trophy from one victim in the home of a potential victim he’s stalking?”
She was frowning, and her tone was almost absent when she said, “I’m no profiler, remember. Not officially, anyway, though Bishop has made sure most of us know more than the average shrink about the psychology of killers. I’ll have to fill him in on the latest, and quickly. In the meantime, what this twist tells me about the killer is what I said, that he’s continuing to change, to evolve.”
“His M.O.?”
She nodded. “And that means something happened to change him. Something’s different in him, in his life, the way he thinks and feels. Assuming he can feel, that is.”
Marc suggested, “Maybe he changed because he was forced to leave Boston. Maybe the experience of becoming hunted himself made it more…imperative…for him to see himself as the hunter again.”
Dani said, “So more care in that part of his ritual. More-elaborate steps before catching his prey. Following, taking pictures, maybe even, in his mind, courting her.”
“Yuck,” Paris muttered.
“It may help us,” Hollis pointed out. “Until that necklace is identified by Becky’s parents, we won’t have a strong tie between Marie Goode and the killer. But if it is identified as hers, then for the first time we may be a step ahead of this bastard.”
“Do we make that obvious?” Jordan wondered. “I mean, have our watchdog presence around her obvious to the killer?”
“It’s a risk either way,” Marc said. “For my part, I’d rather err on the side of protecting a potential victim.”
Hollis looked at him steadily for a moment, then nodded. “Your call.”
“And I run the risk of him just moving on to another potential victim. That being the case, I say we find him before he moves on. So, what do we know about him?”
“We know the type of victims he chooses.”
Jordan said, “Um…I started to bring this up earlier, but if you saw Karen—”
“I know. A blonde, with blue eyes. And according to her missing-persons report, Becky Huntley was a blue-eyed redhead.”
“Both the right type otherwise, though,” Marc said slowly. “Small, delicate in build. Becky was barely eighteen.”
Paris said, “You can change hair color with dye or a wig. And tinted contact lenses are usually enough to change eye color. Would he go that far?”
“To fulfill his fantasy, satisfy whatever need is driving him? I’d guess yes,” Hollis said.
Marc said, “And Bishop’s guess?”
“That’s it.” With a sigh, Hollis added, “Bishop is a gifted profiler in more ways than one, but even he’s struggling to reconcile the differences between these first two murders in Venture and the previous dozen in Boston. And the new information is not going to help clarify things.”
“He hasn’t had much time, after all,” Dani commented.
Hollis shrugged. “He’s had a couple of days since I saw Becky. That’s usually enough time for him to at least get a sense of a killer or a change in one, especially a killer he’s already spent months studying. But this monster is off the charts. Off even Bishop’s charts.”
To the room at large, Jordan said, “I don’t know Agent Bishop, but for some reason that little nugget of information scares me more than anything else.”
“Then you have good instincts,” Hollis told him soberly. “Because Bishop has seen evil up close and personal more times than any of us would even want to know about—and this guy, this killer, is something new.”
“New how?” Marc asked intently. “In viciousness? In cunning?”
Jordan offered, “Even given the carnage we saw yesterday, and granting i
t was as bad as I ever personally want to see, there are countless books and, hell, Web sites devoted to serial killers who were pretty damn vicious and cunning. Cannibals, necrophiles, and animals who did things to their victims so incredibly evil I hope there aren’t names for them.”
Hollis was nodding. “Yeah, the law-enforcement and psychological case studies are full of their work.”
Repeating his question, Marc asked, “So what about this killer is new? What makes this killer so unusual that even a huge task force headed up by the FBI’s top monster hunter hasn’t gotten close in months of trying?”
Hollis hesitated for a long moment, then said slowly, “The belief has always been that when we do I.D. this killer, we’ll discover in his background, his past, what we find in the personal histories of virtually all serial killers. Abuse, dys-function, possibly some sort of head trauma early in life, things like that.”
“If you want me to feel sorry for this bastard—”
Hollis waved that away. “No, no. Most of us also believe that serial killers are born with something missing, whether you call it a conscience or a soul, which enables them to be far more monster than man. We don’t know whether that missing component is all it takes or whether the individual could live a perfectly normal life—at least outwardly—without hurting anyone at all. If his or her childhood environment was nurturing and positive, and there was no trauma, there’s at least the possibility that the person would never commit evil acts.”
“But?” Marc was still watching her intently.
“But. What we are fairly sure of is that the missing component, coupled with either childhood trauma and abuse, a head injury, or some kind of intense emotional and psychological shock, virtually always produces something evil. A serial killer, rapist, pedophile, arsonist—even a terrorist. The inclinations were there, the instincts, the needs. And something happened, over time or in a single traumatic event, to bring them to the surface.”
“I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Marc said.
“Sorry to take so long getting to it. Here’s the thing. From this point on, we’re in that off-the-charts territory. We have theories. We have a few SCU case studies of situations we felt were borderline or that didn’t allow us enough time for any real examination or understanding of the personalities involved. But we don’t have proof. Hell, we don’t have anything close to proof.”
“Hollis—”
She held up a hand. “Marc, trauma—in childhood or as an adult—can also trigger psychic abilities. In fact, some studies have shown definitively that the areas of the brain inexplicably energized in most psychics are the same as those inexplicably active in serial killers.”
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’re telling me we’ve got a serial killer operating in my town and he’s psychic?”
As if, Dani thought with brief, dim amusement, he had not already considered the idea himself.
“It gets worse,” Hollis said. “The SCU has psychics who are extremely sensitive to fluctuations in electromagnetic fields and can detect unusual psychic activity, even at a distance; we call it being very plugged in to the universe.”
“Okay. And so?”
“And so, from reports he’s received from those psychics in this general area, Bishop suspects our unknown subject is one of only a handful of psychics we’ve ever encountered who has more than one primary ability. Not secondary or ancillary abilities, but each as powerful and fully developed as any of the others. We don’t even know how many abilities are possible or which ones he might have. Maybe he’s a telepath and a seer and telekinetic with the ability to heal. Maybe less. Maybe more. He could be a living, breathing miracle, created out of the same unknown horror that triggered his compulsion to kill. Undiluted evil—times ten. And none of us, not even Bishop, has ever faced anything like that.”
11
IT HAD TAKEN HIM HOURS to get her hair cut just right, but he didn’t mind that. There was little sense of night or day in this place, so he paid little attention to clocks and simply rested when he was tired. In any case, he was just a bit obsessive when it came to her hair, he knew that. It had to be perfect. The length and style, the color.
That was important.
He got mad if any of the details were wrong.
The ugly yellow hair he had removed from her head was neatly bagged and put aside; he would incinerate it later, just as he would burn the clothes she had been wearing.
While the hair color was processing, he carefully cut away her jeans and blouse, pausing often to listen to her sobs, to watch the way the small mounds of her breasts jerked and quivered. He left her underwear for last, taking his time, enjoying himself.
He slid the very sharp lower blade of the scissors slowly against her skin, gathering one thin bra shoulder strap and slicing it with a single neat cut. Then the other strap.
He watched for a little while, smiling, as her breasts rose and fell, listened as she sobbed pitifully. He rested just the tips of his fingers on her belly, closing his eyes for a moment to better feel the soft, warm skin and quivering muscles.
He could feel himself stirring, and savored those sensations as well, but reminded himself these were just the preliminaries.
He wanted to make it last.
Her bra was the usual flimsy thing, and it required only a single easy snip of the scissors to part the satiny material between her breasts. He watched again for a few moments, almost holding his breath, because every jerky breath she took caused the cups to slide farther to the sides, oh so slowly releasing her captive flesh.
He waited until a rosy nipple began to emerge, then impatiently removed the bra himself, casting it into the nearby garbage bag holding the rest of her clothing.
His hand reached out, greedy to touch her, and he had to force himself to use only the tips of his fingers to trace the shape of her small breasts, to slowly circle the pebbled surface of her nipples.
“You like this, don’t you, sweetheart?”
She made a wild, muffled sound, straining against the restraints at her wrists and ankles, and he frowned at the strip of tape across her mouth.
“I didn’t want to tape your mouth. It’s ugly, that tape. But you were talking nonsense, and I didn’t want to hear that.” He used his index finger to circle her nipple again and again and rub back and forth across the stiff tip. “I want you to tell me how good this is, though. I want to hear that. Will you be naughty if I take away the tape, or have you learned your lesson?”
She made another unintelligible sound, this one less wild.
“Will you behave? Will you tell me how much you love me touching you?”
She closed her eyes briefly, more tears leaking from the corners, then opened them and nodded.
He pinched the tip of her nipple before releasing it, then used the same hand to reach over and slowly peel the tape from her mouth.
“Please—”
“I told you before, sweetheart, begging is for later.” His voice was patient, but he let her see the closed scissors in his other hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll remind you when. For now I just want to hear how much you love me touching you.”
She closed her eyes, again just for a moment, then opened them and nodded jerkily. “Oh—Okay. I can do that.”
He glanced aside at the stainless-steel work cart, which held several prepared syringes, and frowned a little. She was very lucid, he thought. Maybe too much so. It had been hours since the last injection; he might need to give her another soon.
“Touch me,” she whispered, and drew in a shuddering breath. “I—I love the way it feels when—when you touch me.”
He smiled and carefully lay the scissors low on her belly, pointing toward her legs, with the tip of the blades barely touching the low-cut waistband of her panties. He watched her jerking response, listened to the little moan she tried hard to muffle, and his smile widened.
He put both hands on her breasts, squeezing, rubbing his palms back and
forth over her stiff nipples.
“Yes.” Her voice was little more than a murmur, thick and raspy. “Touch me. Like that. I love it.”
He found the sensations pleasurable but not so much that he didn’t keep glancing toward the timer on his work cart, the timer that was ticking down the few minutes left until he could rinse her hair, and blow it dry, and make sure the rich brown color promised on the box was the right shade.
It had to be just right.
She made a choked sound. “I—I won’t—tell anybody. Please don’t hurt me! Please, oh, please don’t—”
The timer finally dinged, and he smiled. “Good. Time to see if this color is the right one.”
“Oh, God, please don’t hurt me!”
“Now, Audrey, I’ve warned you about that. I decide when it’s time for you to beg, remember?”
“Audrey? I’m not—my name isn’t Audrey.”
He stared at her.
She wet her lips and said quickly, “Okay. Okay. I can be whoever you want me to be.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Audrey. Who could you be but yourself?”
“Right. I’m sorry. I—I just forgot.” Her gaze flitted to the worktable. “It must be those shots you keep giving me. I forget things.”
“Really? Hmmm. I’ll have to note that side effect. For next time.”
“What?”
He bent slightly and used a control at the side of the table to begin tilting it hydraulically, so that the Y-shaped lower half where her ankles were restrained rose and the upper half lowered slightly.
She shivered and bit her bottom lip but remained silent.
He went to the now-lowered head of the table, made sure the specially designed sink was stable beneath her head, and turned on the water. He adjusted the temperature, made it as hot as he could stand, and began rinsing her hair.
She gasped and stiffened but didn’t cry out.
“Sorry, sweetheart, but it has to be hot water. To get all the color solution out.” He rinsed her hair, his gaze wandering from that automatic task after a few moments to roam over her body.
He liked the way she looked on his special table. Each of her naked legs lay in its individual stainless-steel channel, the ankle lovingly restrained by a sheepskin-lined, thick leather strap. The two channels met, more in a U shape than a Y, about eight inches from her crotch, though he had designed that area of the table with a drop flap to allow him complete access to her body. The table was made to fit Audrey, and it fit her well.