Blind Pursuit

50

Gund, driving fast on Interstate 10, heading southeast.

He would keep going until he crossed the state border into New Mexico. In Las Cruces he could ditch the van and steal a car. Afterward, he would get off the main highway and take the back roads. In Dallas or Houston, he would buy new ID.

Did he have money? None. He’d packed nothing, taken nothing. Panic must have chased all practicalities from his brain.

It didn’t matter. Along the way he would steal whatever he needed.

His grip on the steering wheel tightened. He pushed the speedometer needle to eighty as the concrete miles blurred past.

The engine throbbed, and his head throbbed with it. But at least the tingling of his fingers had faded, as had the unnatural heat at the back of his neck and the distant, unreal chiming in his ears. Those symptoms had vanished sometime during his search of his apartment. He had no idea why.

He wondered how much time he’d wasted in that search, exploring every possible place of concealment, the pistol shaking in his hand. Hatred and humiliation had made him sloppy, the search feverish and inefficient. Frequently he found himself checking the same closet or cubbyhole for the third or fourth time.

Finally he understood that she was gone, had been gone for many minutes, and worse-that she must have driven directly to the police.

She would talk to the detective who’d looked into Erin’s disappearance. The man would believe her this time. He would want to ask Gund some questions. Might already be on his way over.

Fear seized him. He ran from his apartment, not looking back, then got on the interstate and floored the gas pedal, barreling past semi trucks and sticker-festooned campers traveling at sixty-five.

Now he was beyond city limits, coming up on the Valencia Road exit, passing it, with Wilmot Road two miles ahead.

Soon he would leave the Tucson area behind. Christ, he never should have come here in the first place. Never.

“Never,” he murmured under his breath. Distantly he noted how peculiar the word sounded, slurred and indistinct, as if he had been drinking, or as if he were mumbling in his sleep.

The thought skipped lightly along the margin of his awareness, leaving him before he could quite grasp it. Unimportant anyway. What was important was to keep driving, get the hell out of here, never come back.

Shouldn’t have left Wisconsin. Things had been all right there. He had been safe there. Safe and empty inside.

For twenty years he’d worked as a janitor at the university, the lonely monotony of his life interrupted only by the periodic need to kill and the anguish afterward.

Perhaps he could have continued that way for another twenty years

… if he hadn’t seen the article.

It was a scholarly monograph on fire setters, appearing in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Some professor had left the slim, glossy publication on a coffee table in the psychology department’s faculty lounge. Gund found it while cleaning up on a winter night in 1992, a few months after the third woman, Deborah Collins, had burned.

The title, printed on the cover, hooked his attention at once. “Fire as Rage: Pyromania and the Antisocial Personality.”

Below it, the byline: Erin Reilly, Ph. D.

Erin Reilly.

A biographical note appended to Erin’s article said she’d recently established a private practice in Tucson.

After that, he checked each new issue of every psychology publication as it had come in. Over the past four years he found several other articles by Erin. All concerned the same issue-fire as a weapon, fire as an instrument of rage.

He wasn’t sure exactly when it occurred to him that she could treat his problem. At first he dismissed the idea; in order to undergo therapy, he first would have to confess, and there had never been any chance he would do that.

Then, last year, the possibility of kidnapping her entered his mind for the first time. The plan exercised a peculiar hold on his imagination. He couldn’t shake free of it. He found himself rehearsing it mentally, examining his strategy for imperfections, revising it again and again.

Last October he quit his job at the university. He sold his ancient station wagon and replaced it with a used Chevy Astro. Packed his few belongings into a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the van, and drove to Arizona.

Money was not a problem for him. In his twenty years of custodial work, he had saved nearly all of what he’d earned, spending next to nothing for the studio apartment he rented. The surplus accumulated week after week, month after month, in a simple savings account. The total was $126,295.32 at the time of his departure.

He had not been putting away a nest egg for his retirement; he merely had never found any use for money. His plan gave him a conscious purpose for the first time in his life.

Erin advertised her practice in the Tucson Yellow Pages. The day after his arrival, Gund watched the office complex where she worked until she emerged at noon.

He recognized her immediately-her red hair was still the same-but the sight of her slender, long-legged figure startled him. At some level he hadn’t quite accepted the fact that she was an adult now.

She got into her Ford Taurus and drove to a restaurant downtown. At the restaurant she met Annie.

The two of them, together. Dining on a sunny veranda. Through binoculars he studied them.

Beautiful. Both so very beautiful.

After lunch, the women separated with a hug. Gund tailed Annie to her flower shop, where he caught sight of a sign in the window: HELP WANTED.

It had been crazy to apply for the job. If she’d recognized him as Oliver… or if she simply had checked out his phony story about a mix-up at the University of Arizona that had cost him a promised custodial position…

But he risked it. To improve his chances he invented a mawkish story about his late wife. The wallet photo he showed Annie was actually one he’d found among Deborah Collins’s belongings. Deborah’s mother, probably.

Annie fell for it. He got the job. Later he tailed her to her home; on a weekend afternoon he spied on her and Erin as they played tennis, then shadowed Erin to her apartment complex.

Once he knew where Erin lived, he began to finalize the preparations for her abduction and captivity. His last step was to purchase the old Connor ranch, the ranch of his boyhood, depleting nearly all of his twenty years of savings to make a single payment of $119,000 in cash. The ranch, isolated yet convenient to town, was ideal for his purposes.

An impeccable strategy, faultlessly implemented. He was sure of that. He had planned and executed every stage of the operation without a single misstep.

And yet here he was, speeding out of town, abandoning his possessions and his very identity to pursue a life on the run.

A freeway sign alerted him to the next exit. Houghton Road.

His foot eased up on the gas pedal, and the van’s speed began to drop.

Odd.

Why was he slowing down? He’d been making good time, and there was nobody ahead of him.

The steering wheel turned under his hands. The beam of his one headlight crossed over the white line as the van pulled into the right-hand lane.

The exit lane.

The off-ramp for Houghton Road lay a hundred yards ahead.

A flick of his hand, and the right turn signal flashed.

He dropped his gaze. Nerveless, paralyzed, he stared at the small, flashing arrow on the dashboard for what seemed like a very long time.

He got it now. Of course he did.

There would be no trip across the state line, no change of identity, no fugitive existence.

None of that ever had been his purpose. He’d merely imagined that it was. The idea had been only a twitch, a last, feeble spasm of rational thought; it had not moved him.

Because he had clicked off. Become unplugged.

Sometime during that episode of rage and frenzy in his apartment, when he’d been hunting Annie, he had slipped into this altered state of mind without even realizing it.

Since then he had been operating on automatic pilot, thoughts running on one track, actions proceeding along another.

At forty miles an hour he left the interstate, then swung north on Houghton Road. He passed the gas station where Erin tried making a 911 call last night.

There were reasons, sound reasons, for returning to the interstate and continuing his drive east. But those arguments held no force. They had long since folded under the pressure of the beating needs in control of him.

Only one impulse motivated him now.

He would kill her. Kill Erin. Take her out to the arroyo and stake her to the ground and burn her.

Next, Annie. Sooner or later she would return to her townhouse. When she did, he would be there. He would tie her to a chair or truss her on the floor, and then…

The van thumped and rattled, and he realized with mild surprise that he had turned onto the side road that led to the ranch. He hadn’t even been aware of slowing down or steering to his right.

Ahead, the gate of the ranch was open, the padlock and chain removed this afternoon to serve as Erin’s shackles.

He guided the van through the gate, to the barn. The barn doors, too, had been left open in his hasty departure. Careless-the wreck of Erin’s Taurus was dimly visible within.

He parked alongside the car. From the van’s glove compartment he took his flashlight and the stun gun.

The flash would be helpful in the arroyo. And the stun gun might be necessary to get Erin there without unduly harming her.

He wanted her conscious when he struck the fatal match.

Funny how calm he felt. Calm outwardly, of course; he always was, once his plug was pulled. But the strange thing was that he felt the same tranquility within. There was none of the turmoil that had accompanied his other killings. No inner witness who looked on aghast.

He was at peace with himself. The words of that smug TV expert came back to him: This is not a tormented person. This is a man who’s quite comfortable with what he does-and what he is.

That never had been true of him before. Had been the furthest thing from reality. But not tonight.

Tonight the burning felt good to him. Felt right.

Flashlight and keys in hand, the side pockets of his jacket stuffed with the pistol and stun gun, he strode out of the barn. He shut the main doors behind him, then crossed yards of brittle grass to the house, his legs cutting space with mechanical efficiency, his gaze focused straight ahead.

Felt right, he thought again. Well, of course it did. Why wouldn’t it?

It was right.

The burnings in the woods up north had been wrong.

He saw that now. The three women he’d killed meant nothing to him. They were mere random strangers, surrogates for the two he’d really wanted. Symbolic sacrifices, that was all. Their deaths, satisfying him only briefly, served no lasting purpose.

But these two were different. These were no strangers, no stand-ins. These were the two who had ruined his life. Who had haunted him, obsessed him, poisoned his mind with unclean thoughts.

Everything he’d done-it was their fault, entirely theirs. They had been the source of all his troubles and afflictions right from the start. They were the unhealed sore in his soul.

He reached the front door, turned the key in the lock. As he entered the house, he nodded in silent assent to his own thoughts, then went on nodding, nodding, the slight incline of his head repeated like a programmed routine.

It was right, so right, that he do this. There could be no hesitation, no doubt. Not this time.

Never could he be liberated from the torment that plagued him-never-until Erin and Annie Reilly were dead.