Blind Pursuit

57

Walker picked up two T.P.D. patrol cars at the interstate’s Miracle Mile entrance. As he passed the Valencia Road on-ramp, he collected a sheriff’s department cruiser also.

The patrol cars activated neither sirens nor light bars on the freeway, a standard safety precaution. Walker, still in the lead, used his horn to scare slower traffic out of the fast lane.

On a tactical frequency the other units were asking questions, and he was doing his best to fill them in. But his best, he had to admit, wasn’t very good.

All he really knew was that a suspect in a possible kidnapping might be at a ranch on Ravine Road, with a hostage.

Or two hostages.

Driving with one hand, he put down his walkie-talkie, switched on his car phone, and punched in Annie’s number.

A recorded voice came on, as it had the last time he’d called. “Hi, this is Annie. I’m not home right now, so if you’re a burglar, I’m in trouble-”

He turned off the phone. Swallowed hard.

I’m in trouble, the message had said.

A joke, of course. Recorded days or weeks ago, irrelevant to this situation.

I’m in trouble.

Ridiculous to dwell on those words, the mock plaintive tone of voice.

I’m in trouble.

Leaning forward, Walker pushed the Mustang to eighty-five.

“Annie?”

Still no response from the other side of the stove.

Though it was futile, Erin struggled against the chain, as if believing that by sheer force of will she could crack open the welded links.

“Dammit, Annie, answer me.”

“Sorry, Doc. She can’t.”

Erin jerked her head toward the doorway, where Oliver stood motionless, watching her across yards of darkness.

His arms hung straight at his sides, his hands wrapped around the handles of two bulky metal canisters.

Gas cans.

“Did you… shoot her?” Erin whispered. “Is she dead?”

“Unconscious.” He spoke in a monotone, all emotion drained from his voice.

“Let her go. Please. If you want one of us”-she sucked in a sharp, shallow breath-“take me.”

“I’m taking you both.”

He set down the gasoline cans near the door, knelt, and calmly unscrewed the lids, his actions controlled, deliberate, robotic.

Nothing she said could move him. Even so, she had to try.

“Oliver.” She held her voice steady, fear channeled into her madly shaking hands. “You can’t do this. Can’t keep on killing.”

“I won’t. You two will be the last. Once you’re gone, I’ll be free.”

He picked up one can, tilted it, and began to pour.

The gurgle of fluid from the spout set Erin’s heart racing still faster. Her legs twisted, knees bending and straightening, boot heels dragging on the floor’s hardwood planks.

In her mind a stranger’s voice kept up a manic, witless patter: I’m afraid, so afraid, so very afraid…

But when she spoke, her own voice was calm and reasonable, the voice of a therapist doing her job. “You’ll never be free that way.”

“Yes, I will.” Oliver walked with the can, pouring as he went, staying close to the living room wall. “Once I’m through with you… once you’re out of my life…”

“We’ve been out of your life before. After 1968 you weren’t Oliver Ryan Connor anymore. You could have stayed away from us forever. You didn’t.”

“No.”

“You waited until August of 1973. And then… Well, you know what you did then.”

No response.

“It was you, Oliver. It had to be. Albert Reilly never set that fire. You did.”

Still nothing.

“Why? Oliver, tell me why.”

Even now he was silent. She feared he had slipped still deeper into the fugue state, to the very bottom of the abyss, where no voice could reach him.

Then, without looking up, he spoke one word.

“Revenge.”

Not much of a reply, but something. She had to capitalize on it, maintain a dialogue. “Revenge-for what?”

“I’d warned her. Warned Maureen never to tell.”

Erin understood. “She waited two years-but in the summer of ’68 she told Lydia at last. That’s why Lydia disowned you.”

“Yes.”

He reached the corner, then continued along the adjacent wall, methodically laying down a trail of fuel along the room’s perimeter. The smell of gasoline, the smell Erin hated more than any other, rose to her nostrils. Nausea coiled in her stomach.

She forced herself to continue her charade of disinterested professionalism. “Tell me about it.”

The noise he made was intended as a chuckle, but came out stillborn, a croak of pain. “An ugly scene. Lydia called me names. Terrible names. I told her she could say the same about the man she’d married. And I told her why.”

Erin nodded. It wasn’t fear for Oliver’s safety that had put Lydia in the hospital with a nervous breakdown, as everyone assumed. It was the double shock of learning the truth about her son and her husband.

The five-gallon can dribbled out its last drops. Oliver tossed it on the floor with a hollow clang. He walked past her, toward the doorway, where the other gas can waited.

Desperately Erin tried to keep him talking, fighting to reinforce the fragile connection she had established. “So you waited five years, then went to Maureen’s house-our house-for revenge?”

“But first I visited Albert at his office.” He hoisted the can by its handle. “He’d thought I was dead. I straightened him out about that… and other things.”

“You told him you were our real father.”

Remorselessly Oliver began wetting down the opposite side of the room. “Came as kind of a surprise,” he said mildly.

“Weren’t you afraid he’d go to the police?” Erin wished the sound of her voice would cover the low, insidious murmur of gasoline escaping from the can. “You were confessing to rape and murder-”

“There was no risk. If I were arrested, the truth about you and Annie would come out.”

The truth. That they were products of an unnatural union, products of incest. Sideshow specimens. Freaks.

Oliver was right. Neither Albert nor Maureen would have willingly brought that fact into the light. Especially not in a small town like Sierra Springs, where everyone would talk.

He reached the doorway to the hall and continued past it to the living room’s rear wall. The thread of fuel was lengthening, inexorably boxing her in.

“What was Albert’s reaction?” she asked slowly.

“Shame. Grief. Most of all, anger. But not at me alone.”

“Who else?”

“Maureen.”

“My mother? She was the victim in all this.”

“Was she?” Another lifeless chuckle. “I told you, Maureen wasn’t married when she visited the ranch. Wasn’t even engaged.”

“Then when she found out she was pregnant-”

“That’s right, Doc.”

Erin shut her eyes. Her mother, panicky, unwilling either to abort the babies or have them born out of wedlock, had lied to Albert, convinced him that whatever precautions he’d taken had failed, railroaded him into a hasty wedding.

She remembered that nightmarish summer evening when Albert, drunk, wild with rage, had railed at his wife, rejected his children, and finally, in a fit of bellowing fury, had promised they would burn, burn, burn.

“In hell, he meant.” Her voice was a whisper, the words spoken half to herself. “In hell.”

The gasoline gurgled to a stop, the can empty. Oliver threw it aside.

“I let him suffer awhile,” he said. “Maureen, too. They might have assumed I’d done my worst. Then on the night of August eighteenth…”

“You broke into the house.”

“Yes. Found Albert asleep in the den. Clubbed him unconscious. Soaked the ground floor first, then carried Albert upstairs and finished the job.”

“In the master bedroom. That’s when Maureen woke up.”

“She saw me, screamed. I gave her a good hard slap, just like I’d done in the barn. She was pleading with me when I tossed the match.”

The floorboards shivered under his slow, heavy tread. He moved to the stove and stood before her, staring down.

“You two got out that night.” Cold words. “But not this time.”

Erin gazed up at him, his face as round and pale as a full moon, his gaze still blank, void of compassion, empty of self.

“You’re lying,” she whispered.

Puzzlement flickered briefly in his eyes. “What?”

“Revenge wasn’t your motive. You had another purpose. A purpose you’ve never been willing to consciously acknowledge.”

“Too late, Doc. Therapy’s over.” He began to turn away.

“That wasn’t a fatherly kiss you gave me, Oliver.”

The words stopped him.

“In Sierra Springs,” she said, “you did more than visit Albert in his office. You spied on Maureen. Found out where she lived and observed her from hiding.”

He blinked. “How did you know that?”

“It’s what you always do. When Maureen visited the ranch, you spied on her from the arroyo. And when you came to Tucson, you must have followed me to learn where I live. I’ve got an unlisted address.”

“All right. I watched her. With binoculars.”

“And while you were observing Maureen’s house, you saw her two little girls- your girls. You saw us, didn’t you?”

“I… saw you.”

“And you wanted us.”

A muscle twitched in his cheek. He said nothing.

“Even though we were little, only seven years old, you wanted us, just as your father had wanted you, just as you’d wanted your mother’s sister. Love and incest-you’ve never been able to separate the two. You wanted us.”

“If I did… so what? So what? ”

“That’s why you set the fire. Not for revenge. You meant to wipe out all three of us-Annie and me and Maureen-so we wouldn’t be there to tempt you anymore.”

“It would have worked. If you’d died-”

“Nothing would have changed. You still would have had the same needs, and you would have responded the same way-by burning other women. Women who reminded you of us, because they were Catholic or they were young or they had the same color hair. The details wouldn’t matter. You would have gone on killing no matter what.”

“I wouldn’t. Dammit, it wouldn’t have been like that.”

“It would. It would have to be. It always will. You think that by killing the object of your desire, you can kill the desire itself. You’re wrong. What you’re trying to destroy is within you, not outside you. It’s part of you. It is you.”

“It’s not.” He shook his head blindly in a last, desperate effort at denial. “You’re the problem, not me. You and Annie. Filth. Whores. I’ll get rid of you, and then I’ll be free, God damn you, I’ll be free. ”

“You can never be free that way-”

But he wasn’t listening anymore. A ripple of spasms in his shoulders, and he pivoted away from her, moving fast toward the front door. Helplessly she called after him. “Oliver? Oliver? ”

At the door he turned. Something trembled in his hand.

A matchbook.

“I’ll be free,” he said once more, his voice muted and faraway.

He took a backward step, removing himself from the flash zone. A wisp of orange light flared between his fingers.

Flick of his wrist, and the match traced a slow arc through the darkness.

The gasoline vapors ignited even before the match hit the floor, triggering a split-second chain reaction that engulfed the lower portion of all four walls in a flexible sheet of flame.

“ Oliver!”

Her scream didn’t reach him. Nothing could reach him now.

Cymbal crashes of shattering glass. Every window in the room disintegrated simultaneously, blown out by the rapid expansion of superheated air.

“ Oliver!”

Still no response, though he must have heard her. He had not moved from the doorway.

Erin had spent her life studying fire and fire starters. She understood what happened next only too well.

The upward rush of intense heat kindled the walls, boiling off the wood’s most volatile contents. In a heartbeat the mist of outgassed turpentine, resin, and oil achieved its flash point, feeding the flames even as the gasoline vapors were consumed.

Convective updrafts teased the fire relentlessly toward the ceiling. Indrafting air from the front door and the broken windows flung exploratory firebrands across the floor.

“Goddammit, Oliver, talk to me! ”

The fire cast a ruddy, wavering glow on his face. He stood motionless, gazing transfixed at what he had done, what he had finally brought himself to do after so many years.

His eyes were wide and glassy. The sparse hairs of his head rustled in the fire’s hot wind.

Flames reached the first of the rafters, caught hold, then hopped from beam to beam. Churning fumes collected along the ceiling, forming a noxious mushroom cloud.

The smoke was what would kill her and Annie. That, or the stinging heat, or the collapse of the roof.

“ Oliver!” She had to make him hear her. “Oh, Jesus, Oliver, don’t leave us here, please don’t, for God’s sake, don’t!” Each breathless shout seemed to jerk the chain tighter around her midsection, the wicked links chewing hungrily at her stomach, her lower ribs. “Don’t let us burn, it’s not the way to solve anything, it’s not the way! ”

The noise around her was thunderous, the Niagara roar of the flames competing with the moans of tortured wood, the pops of metal fixtures springing free of bolts and screws, the sizzle of sparking wires, the whoosh and howl of eddying air currents that spun pinwheels of soot and embers across the room.

Oliver shambled backward, still watching spellbound.

“ Oliver!” she called for the last time.

Abruptly he turned, and then he was running, running into the night.

Gone.

Erin struggled with the chain, knowing she could not free herself, knowing she would be dead very soon, as the lethal heat pulsed around her and the roof beams began to groan.