Dark Eye

22

“Damn it, Boss, it’s been five days.”

“I know how long it’s been, Granger.”

“The press is asking questions. A lot of questions.”

“The press can go screw itself.”

“Did you see those pictures?”

O’Bannon stiffened, like a metal rod had replaced his spine. “Yes.”

“I have to assume we’re not the only recipients. I’ll bet they went to all the papers, all the TV stations. They’re going to want to know what happened to our behaviorist.”

“Who the hell doesn’t?”

Granger’s face twisted up. “Boss-those pictures. They’re-we have to tell them something! Try to explain-”

“Why?” O’Bannon pushed away from his desk, matching Granger bellow for bellow. “It would be different if we knew something. But let’s face it-we don’t. We don’t have the slightest idea where she is or whether-” He stopped short of saying it.

“Face facts, Boss. Five days. None of this guy’s previous victims lasted five days. All of them were killed within a day or two of their capture.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m telling you, we’ve got to face up to it.”

“And I told you-”

“Susan is dead.”

O’Bannon froze.

Darcy sat behind him, in a chair in the corner of his office, not saying a word. Listening to everything.

“Darcy,” O’Bannon said, lowering his voice, “would you leave us alone for a moment?” He fumbled in his pocket for change. “Run across the street and get yourself an ice cream. Get us both an ice cream. Okay?”

“No.”

The response was so startling that both O’Bannon and Granger were thrown. “Excuse me?”

“I think I would rather stay here.” As if a sudden chill had come over him, Darcy’s hands rose and flapped against themselves. “Did you know there was a woman kidnapped in Vancouver in 1979 who was held for sixty-seven days till she escaped? She overpowered her kidnappers and ran away. She hadn’t been harmed.”

O’Bannon and Granger looked at one another. “Darcy…”

“In Omaha, in 1984, a teenage girl was kept in a basement for over six months until she was found by the police. She wasn’t hurt, too.”

O’Bannon felt as if he had gained a hundred pounds in the space of a second. “Darcy, we have to be realistic about this.”

“Elizabeth Smart was gone for eight months, but she came back. Patty Hearst was held for a hundred and twenty-four days until she was found by the FBI, but she had been brainwashed into joining their cause. Do you think Susan could be brainwashed?”

“No,” O’Bannon grunted. “I think anyone who tried to play mind games with Susan would probably end up in the loony ward himself.”

“Actual brainwashing in the post-World War II era has been quite rare and mostly ineffective,” Darcy recited. “Several instances of the Stockholm syndrome have been documented, but it is still uncommon.”

“What have you been reading?”

“Unless there’s torture involved. Do you think Susan might be tortured?” His voice remained as loud and expressionless as ever, but the flapping of his hands accelerated.

“No, son.” He took the boy’s hands and brought them to rest. “I don’t think so. But we have to accept the fact that Susan is prob-is-may not be coming home.”

“I think that I should have figured out that message sooner. Do you think that I should have figured out that message sooner? Should have should have should have. That makes it my fault that the Bad Man got Susan.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“For that matter,” Granger said, “I wish I’d reacted faster.”

“There was no way anyone could have predicted what this bastard would do. He took out three security officers, for God’s sake, with that magic drug of his.” O’Bannon pressed the heels of his palms against his forehead. “Darcy, please go get some ice cream.”

“No. I will stay here.”

“Darcy, we have our best officers working on this case. The best thing you-”

“I am not going for ice cream. I am going to help.”

“Darcy, you’re not a police officer.”

“I could be!” He turned, and although he did not quite make eye contact, he looked in the direction of his father. “You-you-you always w-w-wanted me to be a policeman. So I will be a policeman.”

“Darcy…”

“You-you d-d-don’t think I can do it.”

“These men have been through years of training and-”

“I can do it. I can do training.”

O’Bannon turned for help to Granger, who was pointedly looking away as if he were not paying attention. “You have some… special challenges, Darcy.”

“Everyone has special challenges.”

“But we have to be realistic and-”

“Do you think that any of your officers could decode the Bad Man’s messages? Because I do not think any of your officers could decode the Bad Man’s messages.”

O’Bannon craned his neck. “That was a special situation. You need to go home, Darcy. When I get back tonight, we’ll talk more. Maybe we can make popcorn.”

“No!” Darcy threw down his hands. “I do not need popcorn or ice cream or going home. I will help on this case, even if you don’t think I can. Susan thought I could help and I did help. I did!” He marched to the door, his eyes watering. “I m-m-may be an idiot, Dad, but Susan needs me. And I am going to help her.”

Am I dead? I wondered as the light streamed into my eyes. It wasn’t a warm sensation-more like the grinding of gears against metal, brakes after the brake pads have worn. I should’ve been surrounded by darkness, I remember thinking, but instead I was immersed in light, too much light, white hot and blinding. I wanted to turn away from it but found that I couldn’t move.

“Hello, sugar bear.”

David again. I wasn’t surprised. Wasn’t exactly relieved, either. But he was something to look at. As always.

“What are you doing here? Do you know what happened to me?”

He didn’t have to answer. He gave me that soft, knowing look, the one he always used to disarm my wrath.

“I feel so… stupid. So ashamed.”

“You shouldn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?” A thought occurred-I should try to open my eyes. I needed to orient myself, separate the real from the imagined. “I think I’m… broken.”

“You did before.”

“But this is… different. This seems… I don’t know. Final. Unrecoverable.”

“I’ve felt like that.”

I looked at him unflinchingly, peering into the depths of those overwhelming blue eyes. “I guess you must’ve.”

“But here’s what you need to remember, Susan.”

“You’re giving me advice?”

“This is what you already know. What you’ve always known. What I could never figure out. When you forgive others, you’re not doing them a big favor. You’re doing yourself a big favor.”

“David.” All at once I wanted to reach out, wanted to hold him, wanted to bring him back to me and never let him go. “Am I dead?”

“What do you think?”

“I think… I saw someone. Something. Before you. It was beckoning to me.”

“And you think it was…?”

“You know what I think it was.”

“You think it was Death.”

“Can you tell me what to do?”

He smiled that goddamned irresistible grin. “Well, if he wants to play chess with you, don’t.”

“How long has he been in there?” Lisa asked.

“Days,” O’Bannon replied. They both peered through the window of the door to the small police library where Darcy had taken up residence. He had his books, an evidence file, and an Internet connection. “I’ve been sending in food-pizza and stuff-and sometimes he eats it. I don’t know when was the last time he slept.”

“What does he hope to find?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked, but he can’t really explain it. He just starts stuttering and flapping his hands. I think maybe he has some crazy idea that if he punishes himself enough, it will bring Susan back.”

“What do you think?”

O’Bannon looked away. “You know what I think. What everyone thinks.”

Lisa’s face crumpled. She pressed a hand against the wall to prop herself up. “I should’ve been with her that night. She called me, but I was off on a date with some loser I didn’t even know. If I’d been with her-”

“He might’ve taken you both.”

She shook her head, brushing away her tears. “No. I could’ve stopped it. It’s my fault.”

O’Bannon walked to the water fountain and splashed cold water on his face. “You sound like Darcy. He says the same thing.” He used his shirtsleeve to dry himself off. “Susan had been so depressed, felt so isolated. I think she thought she had lost everything, that no one loved her anymore.” His teeth clenched. “My God. She had no idea.”

“Is there anything more you could be doing?” Lisa asked, her voice cracking. “Anything I could be doing?”

“Believe me, we’re trying everything possible and then some. We’ve reassigned all available manpower and borrowed more from neighboring jurisdictions. We’re tracking down every lead we get, every sighting. So far, they’ve all been bogus.”

Lisa covered her face. “I’ve-I’ve seen the pictures.”

“Damn! What irresponsible-”

“I made him. This reporter I know at the Courier. He showed me.” She pushed herself into the corner, eyes wet and wide. “My God, do you think it’s even possible? Could she still be alive?”

“I don’t know,” O’Bannon said, swearing under his breath. “And at this point, I don’t know if she’d want to be.”

The first sense to return was my sense of smell. There was an acrid bitterness in the air, kind of like coffee left too long on the burner. And there was something else, something fouler. Sour milk. No, that wasn’t it, but it was like that. Stale, stinky. Something I didn’t want to be near.

Then I heard the sounds. Wind whistled in my ears, and I felt cold. And a pounding, crashing sound, an auditory sense of motion. It was that rushing water noise, same thing I’d heard before. A forceful sound, the kind that could sweep me up and wash me away.

I wished it would.

My eyes finally opened on a bleak field of gray. Was I in the desert? I wondered. On a mountaintop? Took me more than a few moments to realize what I was staring at had to be an overcast sky, since I was lying flat on my ass. Literally. Because I was naked.

I suppose that shouldn’t have been a big surprise, all things considered. I was on something hard and flat and grainy. Dirty. It was in my skin and under my fingernails. I wondered how long I had been there. A long time, I thought.

I tried moving and was amazed to find I actually could. My joints were stiff, stiff to the point of near immobility. My skin hurt. But I forced myself. I sat up, and it couldn’t have taken more than half an hour or so.

I surveyed my surroundings. I was in some kind of gravel pit, white and chalky, no one else around as far as I could see. The crashing sound I’d heard was water, huge tumbling quantities of water, tumbling down not far from where I lay.

Eventually I had to turn my attention to myself, in all my glory. My skin was red and scorched, except for the bruises, which were many. I was exposed, floppy, veined, dirty, about as unattractive as it was possible for a woman to be. I repulsed myself.

What the hell had happened? I tried to recall, but the effort made my head pound. I remembered being captured. I remembered lying on his table. I remembered being scared, so scared, like I haven’t ever been before, not even when I found out about David. I remembered hating myself because I was helpless. I should’ve figured a way out. I should’ve pulled some clever last-minute trick that saved the day. Instead, I became a victim. Another pawn in the hands of a psycho who had proved himself a thousand times smarter than I was.

I had no sense of time and no timepiece. I’d forgotten what little I ever knew about telling time with the sun, so I can’t possibly say how long it was before I noticed the boxes. Seemed like an eternity that I sat there thinking, crying, cursing, not able to move, not wanting to move. But eventually that passed, or at least subsided. And I turned my attention to the shoe boxes he had left at my feet.

There were two of them, each with a message scribbled across the top in indelible black marker. The first box read: TO HELP YOU REMEMBER.

Like Alice in Wonderland, I slowly opened the envelope inside, not wanting to know what it contained, but unable not to look.

The envelope contained pictures, lots of them. Polaroids, amateur stuff, obviously taken by Edgar himself. They all had the same subject. Me.

They must have been taken while I was under the influence of his drugs. My eyes were open, but there was no one home. I could tell. There was no me in there. Only my body. My naked body.

I had been posed, over and over again, different for each picture. He had… made me do stuff. He had me playing with myself. Touching myself. Sexual poses, me on all fours, me with my legs spread, me dry-humping the furniture. One nasty pose after another. In some of them, he’d given me props. A broomstick. A Coke bottle. A dildo stuck in my mouth. A dazed, zoned expression on my face, like I liked it. Like I was drunk and I liked it.

I fell forward on my hands, heaving. He must not have fed me, because nothing came up, much as I tried. I hurled so hard I expected the lining of my stomach to spew out. I felt sick. Betrayed. Abused. Raped.

I wanted to throw the pictures away, to lose them, to forget they ever existed. And then I saw the sheet of paper in the bottom of the box. It was a mailing list. All the places he had sent copies of the pictures. All the local television stations. National news agencies. Local radio shows. Police headquarters. The FBI. Chief O’Bannon.

He’d sent the pictures to Chief O’Bannon’s home.

Darcy.

I fell forward, scraping my breasts against the gravel, wanting to hurt myself, wanting to die, wanting this to all be over, just please, please let it be over. I pounded the box with all the force my fists could muster, which wasn’t enough to dent cardboard. Look what he’s done to me, David. Look what I let him do to me.

Of course it was just a matter of time before I opened the second box. It had been labeled, too: TO HELP YOU FORGET.

Only one thing inside that one. A quart bottle of scotch whiskey.

I ripped the lid off the bottle and pressed it to my lips. I was hungry, starved, thirsty, desperate to forget. I opened my mouth and let the liquor course down my throat.

I gagged. The booze spilled everywhere, all over me. I bathed in it. As soon as I’d stopped choking, I tried again. I would use more restraint this time, I told myself. Just take a sip. A little sip, then another. Sip myself into oblivion. I raised the liquid salvation to my lips.

This is what he wants you to do.

I stopped. Where had that come from?

This is what he wants you to do. Why do you think he gave it to you?

I pulled the bottle away and stared at it, as if I had never seen such a thing in my life. He was manipulating me, just as he had done from the start. As I had allowed him to do. This is why he let me live. This is why he gave me the bottle. Because he knows I won’t be able to resist.

And he was so right. So bloody goddamn right.

He was trying to break me, to destroy what little was left so he could scoop up the pieces and reshape me into whatever he wanted me to be.

I pushed up to my feet, amazed that I could do it, and walked toward the noise. I stood naked before the god of the waters, staring down from the precipice. It had to be a hundred feet down to the basin, maybe more. I didn’t even have to climb over a barrier. Just one simple step. That’s all it would take to end it, to find peace. Hell of a lot simpler than slashing my wrists with a shard of glass. No one would care. Not after they saw those pictures. And everyone would see those pictures.

The thundering crash of the water crescendoed in my ears.

That’s what he wants you to do.

I stared down into the maelstrom. And saw something I had never seen before.

That’s when I made up my mind.

First, I got the goddamn pictures and tossed them in. The next bit was harder, a lot harder. But I did it. I turned the bottle upside down and let it pour out into the abyss. It would’ve been simpler to just toss in the bottle, but this was more satisfying. It occurred to me that I might be spiking the Vegas water supply. Well, tough.

The booze was gone. The photos were gone. The need to destroy myself was gone, at least for the moment. I was naked, and I didn’t know where I was, and I had no idea how to get back to civilization. Or even if I should.

I fell back onto the gravel as if I were a bag of boneless meat. And stayed there. In time, I fell asleep. Not unconsciousness, not druginduced stupor, but the real thing.

And I even dreamed. Or something like it.

23

Patrick marched into headquarters, his face taut and lined. He threw his coat at the nearest hook on the rack. It missed, fell in a crumpled heap on the floor. He didn’t notice. He slid behind Susan’s desk and started reviewing all the reports on Susan’s disappearance. Just as he had every day this week. Over and over again.

“You’ve got messages,” Madeline shouted from the lower floor, waving pink slips in the air.

“Give them to someone else,” he said, his face buried.

“They want you.”

“I don’t have time for crackpots and false confessions.”

“Some of them say-” She paused, lowered her voice. “They’ve seen Susan.”

“I’ve followed up on twenty-two Susan sightings. Granger has done more than that. Not a damn one has led to anything.”

“You got a problem?”

Patrick whipped his head up. Somehow, O’Bannon was right in front of him. “Sorry. I’ve been… immersed.”

“So I hear. Obsessed, some say.”

Patrick craned his neck. “Sir, when an officer is down-”

He waved it away. “You don’t have to tell me, Chaffee. I’ve known Susan all my life. I used to diaper the girl’s bare bottom.” O’Bannon’s eyes briefly closed. He looked tired, aged. “Madeline says you were making a stink about the files.”

“I was trying to find out everything I could about Susan. Her background, personnel file, police record.”

“You think the key to finding her is in her past?”

“I don’t know. But profilers are supposed to absorb all the data, collect every scrap of evidence, then come up with some brilliant conclusion. And I’ve read everything else.” He paused. “Except one file. It was logged into the computer index. But I couldn’t find it. Madeline thought maybe you had it.”

“She was right. It’s restricted.”

“I don’t know why you pulled it, but if there’s any possibility that it could help us find her-”

“It’s not about Susan.”

Patrick stopped, thought a moment. “I found it listed in her directory.”

“A cross-reference. It’s about her husband. He was a cop, too.”

“David.”

O’Bannon frowned. It was obvious that this was a subject he preferred to leave alone. “How much do you know about him?”

“Not much. Except that he’s dead. And his loss seems to have really hit Susan hard.”

“It did.”

“Started her alcoholism.”

He shrugged. “Certainly a contributing factor.”

“I know he was a detective. Worked with Granger.”

“Know anything about his death?”

He shrugged. “Police work is dangerous. I assumed he was killed in the line of duty.”

O’Bannon drew in his breath, then slowly released it. “The first part is right. The last part is wrong.”

“He didn’t-?”

“They’d been married eight years. Susan probably wasn’t the easiest person on earth to live with, but then David had a temper on him, too. They fought, but no one thought much about it. In a lot of ways, they were perfect for each other.”

“Chief, are you saying-”

“They had a big fight that day. Right here at headquarters. Everyone watching. He stormed out. And that was the last time we saw him.”

Patrick’s lips parted. “No.”

“Yeah.” He handed Patrick a thin file. “Put his weapon in his mouth and blew his brains out.” O’Bannon shook his head. “I guess he won that argument.”

I was sitting at a dinner table lit with candles. The soft, rosy glow cast a warm aura across the sumptuous spread. I felt all warm and snuggly.

“What happened?” I asked.

Rachel answered. “We found you, remember? In the desert. The police brought you back here.”

I turned my mind back, a mental process that produced physical pain. I remembered wandering around the desert, or trying. But my legs still didn’t work well and could only move a few feet at a time. Something had happened to my right leg, or maybe it was the lingering effect of the drugs. I couldn’t seem to remain conscious long enough to focus my thoughts. I was hungry. And thirsty. I had thought myself very noble when I poured the booze into the brink, but I later came to regret it. I needed to drink. I didn’t need a drink. There was a difference. I kept telling myself.

“I told you I was going to prepare a very special dinner,” Rachel said. “Don’t you remember any of this?”

“I-I-”

Another voice from down the table. “Surely you remember the kiss I gave you when you got home.”

It was Lisa. Lisa!

“I mean,” she continued, “I don’t normally go in for kissing chicks. But when my homegirl has been lost in the desert for damn near a week, that’s different. I kissed with wild abandon.”

“I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to give me a nickname.”

“Well…”

“Or if you do, I want it to be Goddess.”

Lisa laughed. “Goddess it is.” She held up a platter. “I made my artichoke dip.”

I gasped. Lisa made awesome artichoke dip. Three different cheeses, mayonnaise, and oh yes I think there’s some artichoke in there somewhere. It is to die for. She hadn’t made it in months. I’d almost forgotten how good it was.

Rachel held out yet another platter. “Don’t forget the buffalo wings.”

I gazed down in ecstasy. Another favorite. With bleu cheese on the side, not ranch dressing like some lame-o joints served. “Did you make this?”

Rachel squirmed. “In a sense.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that I drove to Chili’s and picked it up.”

I laughed and pushed six of them onto my plate.

Lisa chirped up again. “Don’t forget the potato skins.”

“Potato skins? What kind of a meal is this, anyway?”

“All your favorite junk,” Rachel explained. “You deserve it.”

It was too good to be true. “What about the Shepherds? Will they be joining us?”

She shook her head. “They’ve given up the battle. NDHS, too. It’s sad that it took your being kidnapped for them to realize what a wonderful guardian-parent, really-you’ve been to me. They’ve all agreed that you should have custody.” She giggled. “I’m so glad, Susan. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. I’m coming home.”

“And… and the basketball? And that church group?”

“Oh, the Shepherds made me do that stuff. All I want is to be home with you.”

The flickering glow of the table filled me. I felt a warmth inside, a contentment. Something I couldn’t remember having felt for a long time.

Granger cleared his throat. “Susan, would this be a good time to tell you something I’ve wanted to say for a good long while?”

“Well, that depends…”

“I’m sorry. About the way I’ve behaved.”

“Oh, you haven’t-”

“Sure I have. I’ve been a regular bastard and I know it. I knew it when I was doing it. But I just-I just-”

“I know. David.”

“It’s not that. Not just that.” He sighed. “It’s because you’re such a good cop. And I know it. Hell of a lot better than I am. Smarter. I feel inferior around you.”

“You shouldn’t. Let it go.”

At the end of the table, one chair was empty. The place had been set. “Why isn’t someone there?” I asked.

“Because you haven’t decided,” Rachel said.

I gazed about the table. “Surely all this food isn’t for me.”

“Of course not.” Rachel laughed, then pointed.

David was sitting at the other end, facing me.

“You’re back,” I whispered.

“Surely you knew I couldn’t stay away for long.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

He seemed puzzled. “For what?”

“For helping me. Back in the desert. Helping me survive.”

“Oh. Well, there’s a problem with that.”

“Problem.” My heart raced. All of a sudden I couldn’t catch my breath. “What problem?”

“You see, Susan…” I knew he didn’t want to go on, but he did. He was always braver than I was. “You’re still in the desert.”

“I-I am?”

“Yes, honey.”

“But I can see you. And Rachel and Lisa. And all this food.”

“Because you’re starving.” He laid his hand gently on mine. “You’re dying, sweetheart.”

I opened my eyes. The sun blistered. I didn’t know where I was, found it painful to move. My naked skin was burned and scratched and bleeding. I had chills and sweated and shook.

I had never left the desert. I could hear the crashing of water, but it was more distant than it had been before. Why weren’t there any people around? Shouldn’t there be people? How long had I been wandering? Weak, exposed, lost. Broken.

Had David said I was dying? But I was already dead. Surely I was already dead.

24

She isn’t dead she isn’t dead she isn’t dead I don’t believe that she is dead Mom Mommy is dead and they wouldn’t tell me and everyone looked at me so sad and I didn’t know why and Uncle Braden smelled like rosewater but she couldn’t be dead because if she’s dead then it’s my fault and we won’t have babies and I won’t get to be a policeman and most of all I won’t get to see her and I like her I really really really like her she’s nice to me.

Why couldn’t I have read that message sooner?

DAM YOU IM ACELERATING YOUR EDUCATION YOURE NEXT SUSAN

Dad says I shouldn’t use words like that and I should forget I ever heard them and so I did forget and it took me longer for the letters to talk to me and the Bad Man took Susan. It’s my fault because I’m so stupid stupid stupid I’m a retard just like they say at Dad’s office I’m a stupid stupid retard. Your mother can’t be with you anymore, Bambi. This Bad Man is playing with us he likes to give us clues but we don’t know what they mean and he took Susan and we don’t know where and please let her still be alive please please please Mr. Strickland said that Jesus saves and Jesus protects so please take care of Susan and keep her alive.

DAM YOU IM ACELERATING YOUR EDUCATION YOURE NEXT SUSAN

Also if he spelled better it wouldn’t have taken so long and he made mistakes translating the words into code, too. He left out the apostrophes and he didn’t put a period at the end of the sentence and Mrs. Calloway in first grade said I should always put a period at the end of the sentence but I don’t think that way and she smelled moldy like she didn’t brush her teeth enough and he put in the wrong kind of dam I would’ve gotten it sooner if he checked his spelling.

Unless that’s the trick.

Dad! I need my dad or Patrick or someone I hate it when they make games with words I never get those stupid jokes because words just say what they say and he used the wrong one unless he meant to use the wrong one because he thought it was funny and maybe we can still help Susan maybe it’s not too late for Susan please don’t let it be too late for Susan please please please please please.

Why does everyone who’s nice to me have to go away?

“Paaaa-trick!” Before he could look up, a body fell across the desk, almost head-butting him in the process. It was Chief O’Bannon’s son, Darcy.

Madeline came running up behind him. “I’m sorry, sir. I told him you didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“It’s okay.” He helped the young man off his desk. “Haven’t seen you in days.”

For once, Darcy’s conversation was remarkably direct. “I know where she is.”

Patrick felt a deep sadness in his heart. He knew the boy had a crush on Susan. Even if he wasn’t physically demonstrative, his devotion couldn’t have been more evident. Given his preexisting emotional fragility, her disappearance must be tearing him up. “Did you have a dream about her?”

“I know where she is! I figured it out.”

“I’m sure you did.”

Darcy grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Did you know that in World War II the Allies invented a code that could only be solved if you had a special machine because they used hidden cells and multiple substitutions and-and-” His voice began to break up, like it was tumbling into a funnel. “Did you know that these codes are impossible to solve and that must be why the Bad Man used it when he wanted to say something that we wouldn’t get until it was too late?”

Patrick didn’t know what to do. If this were a normal man, he’d think he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. With an autistic, he didn’t know what it meant. Except that he needed help. “I know you’re good with codes. You figured out what Edgar’s warning said-”

“But not what it meant!” Darcy flapped his hands, rocking back and forth. He broke away from Patrick and circled around the desk, again and again, with increasing speed. “My dad says I don’t get jokes.”

“Well, sometimes I’m not the quickest-”

“But I do! I do get jokes. Maybe I don’t think they’re funny, but I know when people are kidding, some of the time. I knew when the other kids were making fun of me.”

“Darcy-”

“But I hate puns. Why should one word have more than one meaning? It’s confusing and it doesn’t make any sense.”

His agitation was intensifying. Half the office was watching now. Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick saw Madeline go for Chief O’Bannon, probably thinking he was the only one who could get the boy under control. “Darcy, I think the best thing would be for you to go home now. Get some rest. If anything happens-”

“You thought he spelled it wrong!” Darcy shouted. “But he didn’t spell it wrong. He’s too smart for spelling wrong. It was a clue.”

“What?”

“About dam. ‘Damn you.’ But he left off the n. Because he didn’t mean that kind of dam.”

“As I recall, he misspelled a couple of words.”

“To fool us. He’s smart and tricky. You said so in your paper. ‘The subject is possessed of extraordinary intelligence and imagination.’ So why would he misspell words?”

Despite Darcy’s convoluted, histrionic manner, Patrick was beginning to grasp his point. “Are you saying-?”

Darcy climbed up on the desk chair and began jumping up and down. “She’s at a dam! He took her to a dam!”

O’Bannon appeared at the top of the stairs. “Come on, Darcy. Let’s go home.”

“She’s at a dam! You have to go and find her!”

Somehow, O’Bannon managed to drag his son away, apologizing to everyone as they passed. Darcy kept on screaming. He looked back, his hands stretched toward Patrick.

“Go to the dam! Go to the dam!”

Patrick fell back into a desk chair. Was it possible?

Hoover was the closest and most famous dam, but hardly the only one. How could they know? It was probably nonsense. He couldn’t take tips from a hysterical autistic boy. Surely they weren’t that desperate. If there was any chance of finding her, it would only come from good solid detective work. Surely.

“You aren’t real,” I said as I ran my fingertips down David’s perfectly sculpted chest.

“Does it matter?” he replied. “I’m the only game in town.”

I laughed and pulled him closer. “Do that thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know. That thing you do.”

“With… what part of my body?”

“Your nose, silly.” I laughed. I loved it when he was like this, all tender and attentive. Happy. No moods, no complaints, just him and me. “The way you crinkle it.”

“I do not crinkle my nose. That’s a girl thing.”

“You do. Sometimes.”

“I do not.” He pressed against me, letting me feel the ripple of his rib cage, his strong thighs pressing between mine. Letting me remember how it was before…

And then he took me. All in a rush, the way I liked it best, the way that always gave me goose pimples. Orgasm was nothing compared to the creeping, dizzying head rush that hit when he came after me like that. It was all I could do to breathe, to prevent myself from perishing from a surfeit of pleasure.

“Susan?”

I blinked rapidly. That wasn’t David.

A shadow fell across my face. “I’m sorry it took us so long.”

“Patrick…” I grinned a little. “Could you wait a minute? My husband and I were having a thing…”

He put his hand on my forehead. “Why didn’t you stay where Edgar left you?”

“I wanted to stay. David told me I should go.”

“David?”

“That’s what Edgar wanted, you know. He wanted me to stay at that place and he wanted-well, he didn’t get it. I wouldn’t give it to him.”

“You’re delusional, Susan. Which is no surprise, given your condition.” He shouted over his shoulder. “Can I get some help?”

I laughed. “Whatever. You’re not real, anyway.”

He kept on shouting. “Get a stretcher! Start the IV! She’s dehydrated and starved, with a serious case of exposure.”

“You shouldn’t be looking,” I said, giggling a little. “I’m naked.”

“Not anymore.” He spread his coat over me. It felt warm and scratchy. “We’ll get you to a hospital.”

“No, you won’t. I’m just dreaming you. But it’s a good dream. Nice of you to come.”

“I didn’t come alone.”

A moment later, I saw Darcy rush forward, hovering behind Patrick. “Susan!”

Good grief, who let him into this hallucination? “Darce.” I tried to wiggle my fingers but couldn’t. “Nice to see you too.”

His face was weird, eyes wide and kinetic, as if he were being pulled a thousand directions at once. Just as well that he was a stoic sort who wasn’t comfortable with human contact, because-

“Ooof!”

Darcy threw himself on top of me, squeezing me in his arms. “Susan! Susan!”

Well, I couldn’t dream this, could I? “Darcy?” I said weakly.

He was screaming and crying all at once. The volume made me wince, another element I couldn’t be dreaming. “I told them it was a dam. I told them it was a dam.”

“All right, son, please move aside. Let us get her into the ambulance.”

I could tell he didn’t want to let go. Funny thing was, I didn’t really want him to let go. But they pried him away and hoisted me onto a stretcher. Darcy insisted on riding in the ambulance with me. I could tell Patrick didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t want to take the time to argue about it.

It was a pleasant little ride to the hospital, my friends all around me. I slept a little, listened a little, maybe both at the same time. It was nice. Darcy held my hand the whole way.

25

She’s alive! She’s really alive and I knew she would be except I didn’t know but I hoped and she is she’s alive alive and we found her and I guess Jesus does save because I prayed and I prayed and there she was she’s all beat up and she lost her clothes but she’s alive and I’m so happy I was so sad and scared but she’s alive and she let me hold her hand in the big car on the way to the hospital.

Her hand felt nice.

The next time I opened my eyes-at least, the next time I opened my eyes and remembered it-I felt much better. Which was not to say I felt good-I was feeble and tired and had trouble speaking. I felt like hell, like I still had one foot in the grave. But definitely better than before.

“It’s because they’ve been force-feeding you,” Lisa explained. “Through the tubes.”

I made a purring sound. “Must be yummy stuff. Could I get some to take home with me?”

“You don’t want it.” She was sitting beside my hospital bed, her arm snaking through the steel bars and resting on mine. “May be good for you, but it makes your skin cold as ice. You’ll never get a date.”

“Might be better for everyone.” Rachel was also there-really, truly there. I don’t know how she’d managed to slip away from her keepers, but I was grateful they’d allowed it. “Help me out, Rache-have I given you a hug yet?”

“Yes, but here’s another.” She leaned across the bed and gave me a squeeze I could feel through the sheets. God, but that was good. What had I done to merit this attention, this warming affection? It reminded me how pathetically I’d abused their friendship, lying, hiding, them trying their best to help me while I acted as if my only friend was that revolting bottle. I didn’t deserve them. “I love you, Susan.”

Damn it if I didn’t start to cry. Must be the medication. The tears just welled up in my eyes and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop them. I choked, couldn’t speak. I was going to start earning this friendship, this affection. I had to do better, for them if not for me.

“Love you, too,” I snuffled, wiping water from my eyes. “So this is real, right?”

Rachel and Lisa exchanged a look. “As far as we know.”

“And you’re real. This is actually happening.”

“Are we delving into existentialism here?” Lisa asked. “Because if so, I need to go home and reread my Kierkegaard. Then I’m sure we could have a very deep and profound metaphysical conversation.”

“Please don’t.” I squeezed Rachel’s arms. “Did I mention that you look great?” Very fresh-faced and healthy-the picture of an all-American teenage girl. She was wearing a little makeup, which she’d never done before. But I had to admit it looked good on her. She was dressed well, too, in a skirt and some kind of fancy pastel T-shirt. The jeans I was accustomed to seeing her in didn’t show off her legs, which were truly excellent legs. And it appeared that Mrs. Shepherd, unlike myself, knew the current location of her ironing board.

Rachel laughed, obviously pleased. “I think it’s the basketball. I’ve been getting lots of exercise.”

“Heard you were quite the defensive player.”

“Yeah, I do the pick. I mean, they give me that because I can’t shoot. But maybe next year…”

“I have no doubt.” I gave her another squeeze. “You can do anything you want to do. You know that. Why don’t we get together, soon as the warden releases me. Maybe even this weekend.”

She winced. “This weekend?”

“Uh-oh. Big game?”

“Actually… it’s the science fair.”

“You’re in the science fair?”

“Yes!” she said, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I made this cool automated mini-cyclotron thing that demonstrates the principle of torque. Do you know what torque is?”

“Will you think less of me if I say no?”

“ ’Course not.”

“No.”

“Well, then. You need to come see my exhibit.”

“Engineering… that’s Mr. Shepherd’s field, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, before he retired. He’s been a big help. I mean, it’s my work. But he was able to, you know, give me some assistance…”

That I couldn’t have given you in a million years.

There was a knock on the door. Patrick poked his head in.

“Come on,” I said. “We’re having a party.”

He did, and Chief O’Bannon came in behind him-with Darcy. Darcy hung back and didn’t say a word. But he seemed pleased to see me. And I was pleased to see them.

And then I remembered the pictures, which Patrick and the Chief had seen-I could tell just by looking at them. And I wished I could crawl into a coffin and close the lid behind me.

Patrick gently laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Are you feeling any stronger?” he asked.

There were times when I wished I didn’t have this empathic gift. “Oh, God, you want to talk business, don’t you?”

He squirmed slightly. “If you’re up to it.”

Lisa jumped to her feet. “If you guys are going to start talking serial killer, I’m out of here.” She looked at Rachel. “Give you a ride home?”

Rachel nodded. I waved at Lisa on her way out. “Call me tonight.”

“Okay. It’ll be late. I’ve got a date.”

Of course she did. “Don’t kiss anything I wouldn’t.”

“That-” She stopped, made an erasing gesture with her hands. “Too easy.”

After they were gone, Patrick began his subtle probing. Apparently he had been chosen as point man. Darcy and the chief sat quietly behind him.

“I know no one has specifically asked you about what happened yet,” he said.

“True.”

“And I’m sure it’s the last thing in the world you want to talk about.”

“True.”

“But the doctors say you may be here for weeks, and we just can’t wait that long. What can you tell us about him?”

“He was very weird, Patrick. Babbling. I think our theories about multiple personalities must be right. He was talking to a voice I couldn’t hear, acting as if it were controlling him.”

He pondered a moment. “We’ve neither seen nor heard any trace of him since you were kidnapped. There’ve been no more killings or abductions. No letters or phone calls or packages.” He smiled a little. “We were wondering if maybe you’d killed the bastard.”

“I wish.”

Patrick grew quiet. I knew what was on his mind. “Susan… we’ve seen the pictures.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

“The media got them, too. But to their credit, they haven’t run them, not in the papers or TV. But they have… talked about them.”

I closed my eyes. I felt even more naked, more exposed. More raped. But what did I expect? Deference from the media? Right, and a Corvette for Christmas.

“Does Rachel know?”

“She hasn’t seen the pictures, but… she must’ve heard or read something.”

And the custody judge who already thinks I’m unfit, too, no doubt.

I looked across the room at Darcy. Had he seen those lovely glamour shots? Would he understand them if he did? Impossible to know. But when I peered into those expressionless eyes, I was sure I saw something. If not a total comprehension of how I had been compromised, then at least a knowledge that I had been hurt. And a sorrow. For me.

“I want to assure you,” O’Bannon said firmly, “that this will not in any way affect your consulting relationship with the LVPD. As soon as you’re released, if you want to continue working, we want you.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“Although I think it might be best if we took you off this case.”

“No way in hell.”

Silence.

“Look, I wasn’t drinking. I don’t care what it looked like in those pictures. I wasn’t drinking.” At that time.

“Susan-”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t drink!”

Patrick grinned, damn him. “I know.”

“You-do?”

“Blood test. Your blood alcohol was a big fat zero. If you’d been drinking, we’d have found a trace, even after all the time you spent out in the desert. He used his drug on you.”

Thank God I managed to resist Edgar’s little bottle of temptation. “So I can stay on the case, right?”

I could see O’Bannon wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t going to argue with me. While I was stretched out in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, I had the upper hand. Momentarily.

Darcy was the one who broke the silence. “Why didn’t they bring you ice cream? When you’re in the hospital, they’re supposed to bring you ice cream.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “As soon as I get loose of this joint, Darcy, you and I are going on a custard binge. We need to make up for all those potential Very Excellent Days I missed.”

“Is there anything more you can tell us?” Patrick asked. “Did you see his face?”

“Yes. And as it turns out, I’ve seen him before. But he was disguised. He’s smart, Patrick. Smarter than we ever realized.”

“I think that has become abundantly clear. It’s just unfortunate that you were drugged. I wish to God we knew where he took you.”

I drew in my breath, wriggled up against my pillow. I had to seem strong for this. “I know where he took me.”

“What?”

I let the memories trickle in, unwanted as they were. The rushing of water, even when I was flat on my back on his table. We were near the dam, even then. And I saw enough of the interior to make a pretty good guess about the exterior. “Approximately. I can find it, anyway. But I want to go with you.”

“Susan-he could still be there.”

“No. He’s smart, remember? He’s gone somewhere else.”

“But you can’t be sure-”

“Oh, yes,” I said, hoping my resolve was evident. “I can be sure. But we still might find something of interest. Now how fast can you get me out of here?”

“Susan, the doctors say-”

“I don’t care. We have to act fast. And no, I can’t give you directions. I have to go.”

“Susan, you’ve been through a horrible ordeal.”

My eyes narrowed. “And I want to make sure Edgar never has a chance to do that to anyone else. Ever.”

The doctors pitched a fit, but I lied through my teeth and told them I felt fine, and eventually the need to track down this maniac won out over medical prudence. They gave me some pills to help with the pain and a few hours later I was in a car with Patrick trolling around the dam, searching for something I recognized. I knew I could find it. And I did.

“This is it,” I said.

I was certain I was right, even though I’d never seen it from the outside. It was a small cabin, a shack, really, stuck in some of the scrubbiest country you could imagine, not far from the Hoover Dam. The spindly trees and faint vegetation weren’t enough to make anyone forget we were in the desert. The joint was probably intended as a weekend retreat for boat or fish fans. “Let’s go.”

“We need a warrant,” Patrick cautioned.

“You’re a fed. Don’t you carry them around in your back pocket?”

“No. But I can send a fax via my cell phone. And my address book has the numbers of a lot of judges.”

Well, that wasn’t too shabby. Granger put a phalanx of officers around the perimeter, and we waited.

An hour later we were inside.

The ground level was perfectly ordinary. Tacky furniture, no food, a dinky television. But I knew there had to be more. It didn’t take me long to find the basement door. It was locked, not that it mattered.

The light switch didn’t appear to work, so we had to resort to those cool pencil-thin flashlights like you see cops use on television. It was dark and dank, stereotypically basement-like. There was no wind, but I felt a chill just the same. I usually got my impressions from people, not places, but this little dungeon had a palpable ambiance. It was terrifying, threatening, oppressive. Insane.

“Maybe you should stay upstairs,” Patrick whispered to me.

No. In truth, I still felt weak, nauseous, barely able to stand, but I wasn’t going to let them shut me out. I inched forward, shining my light ahead. The more I saw of this room, the more I recognized. The warped wooden walls. The high window, probably the only source of exterior light-and the passageway for the sound waves that brought me back here. The table. His goddamn table with the restraining straps. And there was a stench. A putrid, almost unbearable stench.

I heard a sound, sprang around. The beam of my flashlight crisscrossed the room. Just Granger, creeping up behind me. This was a big basement, I saw now. Maybe it was just an illusion, but it seemed as if it was bigger than the house. Like it stretched on forever.

Then I jumped. Way up in the air, like a human bottle rocket. Dropped the flashlight and everything. And I had practically been expecting what I found. But that isn’t the same as seeing it.

There was a body hunched behind the table. A corpse. My God-had she been there the whole time I’d been held down here? The whole time he’d been playing with me?

It was Fara Spencer. Her eyes were wide open, her face frozen in an expression of fear or panic or whatever her intense final horrific emotion had been. Her skin was gray and seemed stretched, barely covering the prominent bones of her chin and cheek. She was naked, with a huge blood-caked cavity in her chest. She’d been decomposing for more than a week, but you could still tell who it was. Even if you wished you couldn’t.

I clamped a handkerchief over my mouth. The nausea was almost overwhelming. “Call the coroner,” I muttered.

“Already on it,” Granger said, and I guessed he stopped to dial his cell, and Patrick was getting a close-up look at Fara, which explains why I was the first lucky devil to see the really big surprise Edgar left for us.

For me.

At first I thought it was plowed soil. Had he been gardening down here? I wondered. Potatoes, maybe? But my first impression was wrong. There was dirt, and evidence of digging. Two spades were propped up against the far wall.

Not a garden. A graveyard. A real one, this time.

The mounds went wide across the floor and deep into the background. But they weren’t buried. Not entirely. As if to create a memorable tableau, he’d left parts sticking up out of the ground. A decayed arm. A rotting leg. Sometimes a face. And at this stage of decomposition, they all seemed sadly the same. Small. Young. Female. Dead. Long dead.

My God, I thought, as the aching in my gut, in my heart, intensified to unbearable proportions. Must be more than a dozen of them.

We thought Edgar had five victims. We thought he began with Helen Collier.

We were wrong.

My head became unbearably heavy. My legs began to ache, pinpricks running up and down them. I remember thinking, I ought to get to a chair. But there was no chair, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to that table. I heard Patrick scream out my name. I saw the dirty ground, the corpse-strewn soil rushing toward me.

And then I was out.

So they finally found it, he observed, smiling to himself. The audi-tion. The warm-up act. It seemed more impressive, viewed from this height. Almost disturbing for its… wastefulness. But this had been the work of his previous incarnation. Not him. Another person altogether.

He had expected them two days ago, and was startled to see not only that they finally arrived, but that they had brought Susan with them. She must’ve insisted.

She had not been drinking. Had she resisted the temptation he’d laid before her? Had he broken her, or had she somehow managed to reassemble herself? He would have to wait quietly and watch. Proceed with the new plan, with the implementation of the secret he had been given. And when the time came, hope that Susan was ready for him.

No wonder he had found himself attracted to Susan. It was all so clear now, now that he knew everything.

She was the Vessel.

He put the binoculars back in their leather case. It would be so easy to pick them all off, one by one, leaving nothing but a few more corpses littering this potter’s field. And why not? He could do anything now, anything at all.

He’d had to isolate himself these past few days, return to the texts, meditate. Commune with his totem. He eventually realized that his flaw was not so much in his actions, nor in his plan-but in himself. He could not force the offerings-they had to come willingly. These paltry reincarnations were woefully insufficient; something far greater was necessary to merit the meed he desired. And he had to secure a Vessel worthy of the soul with which he sought reunion.

He was a new person now, a new man with a new plan.

He was ready to Ascend.

His long days in the xeric wasteland had been fraught with temptation, but he had resisted them. His passage had been filled with torments, but he had weathered them. His last night in the Spring Mountains had been the time of his translation. He had offered his very essence, everything he had. He had gone without food, without water, re-creating the vision quest that first revealed his true destiny. He’d stripped and pounded himself with sand, abused himself with the cactus flower. He’d bled and he’d wept. And when at last he’d fallen down on the rocky crag, exhausted beyond reckoning, he believed he had failed.

The truth had come to him in a dream, as did all knowledge of that other blessed world.

“You have done well,”said the voice, the one that could not be ignored. “You have pleased us, and so you shall become one with us. The time of your Ascension is at hand.”And so the voice which he had once heard in his head became his own. He became the totem. And the totem was he.

He looked down now upon those pitiful fools, scurrying about like infantile ants. He laughed, and even his laughter was filled with power. He was the mountain now, and they but grains of sand, a part of him, but not of him, in his world, but not of his world. He was invulnerable, indomitable. He had slipped beyond the boundaries of time and space-By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named Night, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly… / From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime… / Out of Space, out of Time…

He stretched his arms toward the sky, letting the stardust settle all around him, feeling at home and at one with the cosmos. I am larger than death, he knew, and greater.

The man I once was is no more.

I am the Raven.

26

After I came to, I stayed outside the basement while the crime techs did their work. There was nothing I could contribute at this stage. Better to let the experts work unimpeded. I took another pill, rested in the backseat of Patrick’s car. I still felt drawn, unsteady. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was embarrassed. Fainting was so amateurish, and worse, so… girlish. Even if I did just get out of the hospital. It was exactly what the old-guard grunts expected someone like me to do.

After another hour or so, I got bored and slowly made my way inside. I saw Amelia Escavez outside the house. She had a football-sized metal frame on the ground and was pouring plaster inside it.

“Another tire track?”

“Footprint. Wanna see?”

I did. “Think it’s him?”

“A definite possibility. There are several of them around the place.”

“Anything that might help us find him? A distinctive tread, maybe?”

“I don’t think so. But it’ll be good for confirmation if you do catch him.” She quickly corrected herself. “When. I mean-after-”

“I know what you mean.”

I entered the house. Crime lab guys in coveralls were working over the shack, upstairs and down, hoping against hope for any trace of a clue that might tell us where this man was now. Using something called gentian violet, which stained skin cells left behind on adhesive surfaces, they’d managed to lift prints off a piece of masking tape. But since Edgar didn’t appear to have a record, that wouldn’t get us far. Ditto for the hair and fiber traces. As always, Edgar hadn’t given us anything that would help us find him. Didn’t even have the courtesy to leave a forwarding address.

When I got to the basement, I found Darcy hunched over the remains of Fara Spencer. Now that was a bizarre sight. Here was a kid so innocent, so gentle, he literally wouldn’t step on a spider. Terrified of puppy dogs. But he had no difficulty working around a corpse. Of course, the corpse could do him no harm now, but that wouldn’t comfort most people. Only Darcy’s brain was free from those irrational emotional associations we have about the dead.

“Did you ever eat bugs?” he said when he saw me approach.

I don’t know. Maybe it was the combination of that horrible corpse-which was crawling with bugs-and the suggestion of eating them that made me certain I was going to heave, the only thing that would be even more embarrassing than fainting. I placed a hand against the wall to steady myself and willed my stomach to behave. Most importantly, I kept my eyes locked on Darcy-not the corpse he was scrutinizing, and not the field of corpses that lay beyond.

“No, my tastes run more to meat and potatoes.”

“Did you know that some people in some countries eat bugs all the time? I don’t like eating bugs. When I was in grade school, some of the other kids told me to eat bugs and I did. But then they laughed at me.”

I’d wager he got a lot of that in school. “I don’t blame you for not liking bugs.”

“But I do. Bugs are cool. Except for spiders. Just not for eating.” He grinned guilelessly.

Well, of course-what little boy didn’t like bugs?

“I used to collect them, but my dad made me throw them all out.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Then I started reading about them in the library. Did you know that blowflies love dead bodies?”

“I, um, think I heard that mentioned at the academy.”

“They love to lay their eggs in dead people. This body has bugs all over it.”

“Yup.” I didn’t look.

“Do you know how long it takes a blowfly to go from egg to larva to pupa to adult?”

“Oh, the answer’s on the tip of my tongue…”

“When it goes from egg to first instar larva, it’s about this big.” He held his fingers only a few millimeters apart. “Then it sheds its skin and goes to second instar larva-this big.” The fingers widened. “Then it sheds its skin again and does the third instar.” His fingers were more than ten millimeters apart now. “After that, it becomes an adult.”

“That is so cool. You know, I should go to the library more often.”

Darcy pointed at the squirmy, whitish bits crawling out of Fara’s nose. “Those are third instar. She died ten days ago.”

I did a double take. “But how could you possibly-”

“It takes eight days to get to the third instar.”

“But you can’t know when it was born.”

“Blowflies like to lay their eggs in dead people two days after they die. Eight days later, these bugs are third instar. So she died ten days ago. Right?”

The things that emerged from that wild gallimaufry brain of his. I wondered if maybe he was just talking through his hat, trying to impress me. But I really didn’t think he possessed the slightest instinct for deceit.

“He’s right.”

I turned and found Jodie Nida, the coroner’s assistant, standing behind me. “You know the five stages of decomposition?”

“Um, gross, grosser, more grosser…”

“No. Initial decay, putrefaction, black putrefaction, butyric putrefaction, and dry decay. Each is associated with a different type of insect infestation. Your young associate was describing the putrefaction stage-that’s when blowflies like to join the party. The gas formed by bodily organisms causes the body to swell. And smell. Blowflies groove on that. Which is why the body has those larvae crawling in and out of every available orifice.”

“Except her mouth,” Darcy said, not looking up.

Jodie examined the body. Bugs all over the nose, the eyes, the ears, the cavity in the middle of her chest. But not the mouth. “You’re right, kid. Guess they didn’t like her lipstick.”

Darcy tilted his head to one side. “Which do you think would be grosser-her lipstick or that big hole in the middle of her chest?”

Jodie chuckled. “Blowflies have different tastes than you and me.”

“I had this teacher once, Miss Overton, who tried to kiss me on the forehead every day. She wore lots of lipstick. I thought it was yucky.”

We all laughed, which was pretty amazing, given the circumstances and surroundings. Here we were, standing in a field of corpses. And what does Darcy think is gross? Lipstick smooches.

And you know what? He’s right.

“Twenty-two corpses, total,” Patrick announced.

My eyes closed. “Jesus God. All young girls?”

He nodded. “Brace yourself. You’re about to be inundated with white shirts.” So he knew how respectfully we locals spoke about his brethren. “No question now but that this case is federal. And major.”

Just as well, much as I hated to admit it. It wasn’t as if we were closing in on him. “Anything new from forensics?”

“No. But they have instructions to copy us on all reports. And there will be a lot of them.” He looked at me, and his eyes seemed to soften. “I’m thinking we need to spend the night together.”

Could he possibly mean what he was saying? After what happened to me? “Are you saying-”

“Pull an all-nighter. Like we were in college. Rework the profile from top to bottom, incorporating all this new information.”

I stared at him. “That won’t take all night.”

He looked back at me. “Then we’ll have to think of something else to do.”

My cell phone rang. I opened it up, not even thinking.

“Hello, my dear. Glad you made it home all right.”

I tensed up, my back rigid. Bugs were crawling all over my skin, sending prickles of fear coursing through me. I could never mistake, never forget, that voice.

I mouthed to Patrick, “It’s him.”

“I made it, all right. No thanks to you.”

“Susan, you wound me. Did I hurt you?”

“Damn straight.” I realized this probably wasn’t the psychologically soundest technique for extracting information, but I couldn’t help myself. I hated the bastard. I hated him. I could never forgive what he did to me.

“I caused you no physical injury. And I gave them a fair clue so they could find you.”

“So what do you want? A medal?”

“You.”

My heart stopped. I almost couldn’t speak. “You-had me.”

“Not your body. Your mind. I want you to see what I see. I want you to join the enlightened. The name Pulaski is etched on the rolls of Dream-Land. You are to be the Vessel.”

“What about the other girls? The twenty-two we found in your basement. Were their names etched, too?”

“I haven’t given up on you, Susan. You’re very special to me.” He paused. “I slept with you, Susan. Did you know that?”

“I-I-” The gorge rose in my throat. I felt physically ill.

“While you were sleeping. I held you close, pressed up tight, your naked body against mine.”

“You-”

“It was meant to be, Susan. I knew that. Every time I touched you. Our destinies are intertwined.”

I screamed into the phone. “You had no right to-”

“I did what had to be done. Just as I do now. You will come to understand this, Susan. Soon. The Day of Ascension is almost upon us.”

“What’s going to happen? What are you planning?”

He sounded rapturous. “Something immense. Something spectacular.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“It starts tonight. The new offerings will be chosen. And it ends as the prophet would’ve wanted it.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The end of the world, Susan. The end of this world. The start of the world to come.”

And on that note, he hung up.

“We have to put our plans on hold,” I told Patrick. “I mean, for the-the-you know.” I stuttered like a stupid schoolgirl. “We should go on patrol. Even if it’s hopeless and futile. We should try. Tell Granger to get every man he has out on the street.”

“You think Edgar is going to do something tonight.”

I felt a chill spread through my entire body. “I’m certain of it. I don’t know what. But he’s starting something. Something new, something horrible. Something worse than anything he’s done before.”

Judy and JJ and Tiffany waited until they were sure no one was watching, then tiptoed past the PARDON THE INCONVENIENCE cones and slipped behind the door.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this!” JJ squealed.

“Me neither,” Tiffany said breathlessly. “Wait till we tell the rest of the squad. They’ll die!”

The three girls clung to the shadows draping the walls, then crept through the cobwebs and pumpkins and papier-mâché ghosts.

“Do you think he’s been here?” Judy whispered.

“You know he has,” JJ replied. “I mean, how could he not? That’s where they found the first one. It’s probably why they’ve shut it down.”

“Shhhh,” Tiffany said. “We can’t stay long. Mrs. Cross will miss us. I just wanted a little souvenir. Maybe get my picture taken in the graveyard.”

They were wearing matching uniforms, V-neck sweaters and short pleated skirts, both in orange and black. They were all three teenagers, all three blond, all decked out in makeup and sports bras.

“All right,” Tiffany said, passing a palm-size metallic object to JJ. “Here’s my Advantix. Take me on the porch with the graveyard in the background. I’m going to try to look scared. Does this look scared?”

“More like you’re having an orgasm.”

Tiffany knocked her on the shoulder. “You whoredog.”

“I’m not a whoredog.”

“Are.”

Not much of the haunted house façade was left. The hotel appeared to be in the process of creating a new decorating scheme.

“Stop!” she hissed. “Did you hear something?”

They sneaked back into the shadows, stopped, listened intently. JJ wished she had thought to bring a flashlight as well as a camera. The atmospheric darkness, while useful for avoiding detection, became oppressive when she suspected someone else was in the room.

Suddenly, just at the edge of her peripheral vision, Tiffany saw a flicker of movement.

“Over there!” she hissed.

The others turned just in time to see the approach of a slight dark figure, hair wild, arms waving, running toward them. “Nevermore!” he bellowed.

The girls screamed. “It’s him! It’s him!”

One after the other they ran toward the front door-only to find it securely locked. They pounded with their fists, but it would not budge, and no one came to their aid.

They could see him more clearly now. He was wearing a black waistcoat with a ribbon tie. He had a small mustache and a furrowed brow and eyes that peered at them like daggers. He spoke again, an evil smile playing on his lips. “ ‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…’ ”

“Help! Please! Someone!”

The dark figure held his arms over his head like a monster and shouted: “Boo!”

And then he began to laugh.

A moment or two later, the girls stopped pounding. They stared at the formerly menacing figure, now prostrate on the floor, giggling at them.

“S-S-So-you-thought-” It was difficult for him to speak, he was laughing so hard. “You thought I was the guy?”

JJ felt foolish and annoyed. “Well, you look like him.”

“And how would you know what he looks like?”

“You’ve got that whole Poe thing going on.”

“Ah. That would be a clever disguise.” He pushed himself up off the floor, brushing the seat of his pants. “My name is Elliot Barnes. I’m an actor. I used to work here till they shut down the Poe display. And you are…?”

With some reluctance, JJ introduced herself and her two friends. “We’re here for a cheerleading competition. We had some spare time, and we’re not old enough to gamble, so we thought…”

“That you’d come see where the first body was found? The parking lot where Dr. Spencer was kidnapped?” He shook his head. “Rather morbid bit of spectating.”

“But this story is huge! And it started right here,” Tiffany said. “It’s all they talk about on the news!”

“And isn’t that a sorry statement. On a slow news week a celebrity hangnail could command national attention.”

JJ cleared her throat. “Can you tell us why they’re shutting down this room? I think it’s kinda cool.”

“Well, after the body was found here, it seemed in bad taste, even by Vegas standards. There was some thought of simply eliminating the graveyard, but now, with all the attention this case has been getting, Poe has lost his fun factor. We’re going to remodel the room. This haunted house will become the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris. Should be ready by Halloween.”

“Bitchin’.”

The man stopped, tilted his head, looked at her strangely. “Would you mind saying that again?”

JJ gave him a look. “Why?”

“Humor me.”

“Oooo-kayyy.” She glanced at her friends and shrugged. “Bitchin’.”

“Perfect delivery.” He snapped his fingers. “Has anyone ever told you that you resemble Britney Spears?”

“Me?” She pressed her hand against her chest. “No.”

“I’m surprised. Are you familiar with our Legends show? It’s an impersonator gig. They’re all the rage right now-hotter than the buffets. Everybody’s got one, but ours is the best. We’ve been looking for a Britney Spears.”

“Serious?”

“Dead. If you’re interested, I could set up an audition.”

She hesitated. “I can’t sing all that well.”

“You don’t have to. We play records-all you do is move your lips. Well, for a Britney Spears show, I suppose you move everything. But you don’t sing.”

“I can dance,” JJ said, bubbling. “I’m a cheerleader. I know how to move.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“What do you think, girlfriends?” She turned to her cohorts, then back to him. “You got any parts for my friends?”

“I can’t guarantee anything. But Britney usually performs with backup dancers, doesn’t she?”

“Cool! What would I have to do?”

“Just audition.” He handed her a card. “Here’s my address. If you could come by tonight around midnight-”

JJ’s brow furrowed. “Is this your place?”

“Yes. I just moved in. Why?”

JJ stared at the card pensively. “I don’t know… I’m not sure I’d feel right going to a stranger’s house alone. I mean, I’m sure you’re a nice guy and all, but what with… you know. All that’s been going on.”

“I can assure you I’m perfectly safe.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, but-”

“I’m not really Edgar Allan Poe, you know. I just play one on TV.”

She giggled. “Well… could we all come? Together?”

He clasped his hands together. “I think that would be lovely. Strength in numbers, right?” He beamed. “I have a very good feeling about this audition. I have something marvelous to show you.”

“Freeze!”

The girls jumped. From behind the crumbling haunted house façade, a man in a uniform came running toward them.

“Elliot, you’re under arrest.”

The man in the Poe getup threw up his arms. “Damn! What are you doing here?”

“Protecting these foolish young ladies from you.” He grabbed the man’s wrists and handcuffed him. “Hotel security, ladies.”

Judy took two steps backward. “But-doesn’t he work here?”

“No, he doesn’t, and if you don’t mind my saying so, miss, you were foolish to think he did just because he’s in a Poe getup. I’ve been listening, waiting until he solicited an illicit rendezvous with minors. This man is a known exhibitionist.”

“A-what?”

“He had something marvelous to show you, all right. But it wouldn’t have gotten you a part in a show.”

JJ gulped air. “Oh, geez, yuck. I feel so stupid.”

“You should. Do you girls understand that there is a sadistic killer on the loose in this town? This isn’t the time to go sneaking away from your teachers to see if you can get a souvenir from a crime scene. Young women are being tortured and killed. And the way you were acting, you could well have been next on the list.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Tiffany jumped in. “We weren’t thinking.”

“Yeah,” Judy said. “We’ll go back where we’re supposed to be. We promise.”

“As if that was worth anything.” He pushed his arrestee toward the door. “You just stick with me, young ladies. I’ll drop him off at our holding facility. And then I will personally escort you back to your sponsor.”

“You don’t have to do that. We can just-”

“With all due respect, miss, I’m not offering you a choice. I’m in charge of security here, and the hotel doesn’t need any more young corpses turning up. You’re sticking with me.”

Tiffany gazed at him with admiration. “He’s right. He’s got a job to do. Let’s go with him, girls.”

They followed the guard out of the ballroom.

The irony, he realized, a few minutes later as he led them out to his truck, was that all the publicity about the mad Poe killer had made it not tougher but easier to obtain offerings. When people are afraid, they put their trust in authority figures. A little too much so, as it turned out.

He could hardly contain his delight. This was so perfect, and so much simpler. Why not do all three at once? Now that he knew the truth, knew all the secrets, everything was so clearer. But those cheerleader outfits would have to go. Garish colors, preposterously provocative short skirts, even matching colored underwear. They looked more like streetwalkers than schoolchildren. Shocking. And the makeup would have to come off, all of it. The jewelry. And God knows, the studs. He just hoped none of them had tattoos. That could be time-consuming. And painful.

He smiled with the sweet contentment of a man who enjoys his work, who knows that his endeavors are worthwhile. There was so much to be done. So much wonderful work to be done.

The Raven never rests.

“We’re not going to find him, are we?”

It was two in the morning, and I suppose Patrick was tired of humoring me. “Did you think we would?”

No. Of course not. Catch a killer before he strikes when you haven’t got the who or what or where, only a deadly certainty that it will happen? Not likely. But I needed to try. If there was any chance of preventing a girl from experiencing what that man did to me, I had to try.

“We can pack it in,” I said, trying to be charitable. “If you want.”

“I can take it as long as you can,” he replied. “I’m a fed, you know. We’re invincible.”

“I’ve heard that. But I’ve never had a chance to prove it.”

“You came damn close the other night.”

Ouch. Me and my smart mouth.

I looked out the window again, searching for some basis-any basis-to change the subject. Barry Friedman, my favorite comic, was playing at the Excalibur. What a treat that would be. Put all this misery aside and just laugh for a while. But I knew that wasn’t an option. Didn’t matter where I sat-I wouldn’t be thinking about the jokes.

Patrick’s face was a study in chiaroscuro as the car oozed down the street, segueing from one bright light to the next. A handsome, strong face. One I’d never taken the time to sort out my feelings for. Oh, sure, I’d had sex with him. I think. I’d yelled at him, bossed him around, been rude as hell to him. But how did I actually feel about him? How did I feel about anything? Why didn’t I know? Had the booze deadened me? Or was I just dead and using the booze to hide the ugly truth from myself?

Hadn’t had a drink all day. Hadn’t had a drink since Edgar grabbed me. Another good thing about wasting the night trolling the streets of Vegas with Patrick. No opportunity. Of course, I felt hellish, but there were extenuating circumstances. Patrick had wanted me to check myself back into the hospital, and I have to admit that I was tempted. But I couldn’t let this manhunt go on without me. I was needed here.

On the left, just past Circus Circus, I saw the Transylvania, where the killer had dumped his first victim. Where he’d taken Fara Spencer. I was tempted to pull over and check the joint out. But why? Edgar was much too smart to go there again.

“Maybe it is time to call it quits,” I said.

“Want me to come back to your place?”

“Nah. I’m pooped.”

“I can sleep on the couch.”

“Not necessary. But thanks.” A nice guy. Which no doubt explained why I still felt ambiguous toward him. God forbid I should get hooked up with someone nice.

Except that David had been nice, hadn’t he? Once upon a time. Before the troubles started.

My God, David. Was that the real reason I was ditching Patrick tonight? Because I was still hung up on my dead husband? Or more accurately, because I still hadn’t forgiven my dead husband?

Funny how much clearer you can see things when you’re sober.

“Just drop me out front,” I told him. “They’ve got so many people watching my place now, Houdini couldn’t get in.” I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Night, Patrick.”

“Night.”

And I headed back to my boozeless, snoozeless, antiseptic hotel room, a yearning in my chest, my body complaining because I wouldn’t give it what it wanted, my heart aching because even if I didn’t know her name, I knew there was a girl out there dying tonight. One more person I had failed to save.

I pressed up against the door, eyes clenched shut. So this is what life is like sober? Wonnnnnnnnderful.

27

You’d think nothing on earth could be more innocent and stress-free than a stroll through the forensic lab. You don’t expect screaming and shouting-that happens upstairs, where we high-IQ detectives hang out. And you certainly don’t expect to see your toxicology expert getting into it with the boss’s son.

“Please please please please please please please please please please please,” Darcy said, over and over. He wasn’t exactly shouting. His voice was always loud. Near as I could tell, his theory was that if he didn’t give his opponent a chance to argue with him, then he won the argument. An approach I have to admit I’ve used once or twice myself.

“Listen to me!” Jennifer Fuentes (yes, now I knew her last name) was trying her best not to lose it. “There’s no poison!”

“Please please please please please please please please please please please.”

Jennifer was totally losing that cool detached scientist thing.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“This guy is making me crazy!” Jennifer said. “The chief asked me to humor him. He didn’t say I had to take orders from him. Especially not stupid ones.”

Darcy looked at me, his face brightening. “Did you sleep well?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. Why do you ask?”

“Your breath.” And then he started right back up again. “Please please please please please please please please please please please.”

“Would you make him stop that?” Jennifer begged.

“Sorry. I work with him, but I don’t control him.”

“Try!”

I shrugged. “Darcy, lay off already. Before you get carpal tongue syndrome.”

He did. Instantly.

Wow. Feeling more powerful than a locomotive, I asked Jennifer, “What does he want?”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s got this crazy theory that Fara Spencer was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” I winced. “Darcy, I think we all know how she died. You may have noticed that big hole in her chest?”

Darcy flapped his hands. “Did you know that one in five domestic murders are committed with poisons you can obtain without a prescription?”

No, and I was happier not knowing. “Any chance he’s right?” I asked Jennifer. “I mean about the poison.”

“None.”

“You did a tox screen?”

“Of course. Came up dry.”

“But as I recall, your previous tox screens didn’t detect the drug Edgar was using to paralyze his victims.”

“That was a totally different situation. We couldn’t miss the cause of death.”

You wouldn’t think. Still, Darcy had been right before…

“You know, Jen,” I said, slow and cautious, careful not to bruise any egos, “Fara Spencer was killed a good ten days before we found her. Any chance the poison might’ve broken down in the body? So it wouldn’t show through normal toxicology tests?”

“Yes, it’s possible, but we have no reason to believe that happened. Anyone can see how the woman died.”

“Would you mind testing a tissue sample?”

“For what reason?”

“To make me happy.” Seemed like a better answer than Because I said so.

“This is very irregular.”

“Story of my life.”

She fidgeted with her rubber gloves. “I suppose I could cut away a little something near the exposed chest…”

“Mouth,” Darcy said.

“Huh?” we replied in unison.

“Do you think that maybe you could take the tissue from her mouth? Because I think you should take tissue from her mouth.”

“Why?”

“Did you notice that there were no blowflies in her mouth? I bet blowflies don’t like poison. I don’t think I would like poison. Do you?”

The toxicologist and I exchanged a look.

“Jen, do the test. I want the report on my desk ASAP.”

He held the tip of the pendulum delicately between two fingers. He had honed the blade until it was razor-sharp, and he did not want to cut himself. He pulled it back to the height of its arc, then released it.

JJ screamed.

“I suppose you know how this works,” he said, reclining in a chair near her table. “Everyone does. Even those who have never read the story. Have you read the story, JJ?”

“N-N-No.”

“Seen the film, perhaps?”

Her voice was choked and broken. Her eyes were fixed on the steel blade swinging back and forth only a few inches above her chest.

“Maybe. I-I’m not sure.”

“No matter. I just didn’t want you to have any erroneous misconceptions. You see, in the original text, the narrator escapes. Oh sure, he’s sliced once or twice across the breast-”

JJ’s face turned ashen.

“But he survives. My dear JJ-” He took her hand and squeezed it. “You will not.”

“W-W-Where are my clothes?”

“Burned. Nasty provocative little things. I’m astonished any reputable high school would allow you and your raffish companions to wear them-much less make them an official uniform.”

“Did you… do stuff to me? While I was out?”

“Like what?”

Tears welled up in her eyes. “Like… sex stuff?”

“Would it bother you if I did?”

“I’m only seventeen, and I’m still a virgin and-”

“Liar.”

“I am!”

“My dear, I can assure you I conducted a most thorough examination while you were unconscious.” He looked at her sternly. “You are no virgin.”

Her eyes were trained on the pendulum. “How-how high up is that thing?”

“At present, it swings about four inches above your lovely chest, but it is descending at a rate of an inch every minute. So you see, you still have a little time to enjoy the lovely mesmeric swinging-before you feel its cold blade slicing your flesh.”

Her head whipped back and forth, her face contorted with fear. “Why are you doing this to me? I haven’t done anything to you.”

“Oh, my sweet thing. Please listen.” He scooted his chair closer to the table-though careful to stay out of the arc of the pendulum. “I know this will be difficult for you to comprehend. So much of what we are told in life is simply… wrong. The emphases are put in all the wrong places. Look at you. Devoting yourself to cheering for the accomplishments of others instead making accomplishments of your own. Dressing up in that blatantly objectified costume that can serve no possible purpose other than the titillation of the dominant male hierarchy. Painting your lovely face.”

He reached forward and stroked her cheek. “You have fine features, my precious. Why would you smear paint all over them? Because society has taught you that your God-given looks are insufficient. In order to be attractive to men-and of course that is your principal function in life-you must add artificial color. It’s a shame.”

JJ licked her lips. “If-if I promise not to wear makeup, would you please stop that-swinging thing?”

“I merely use this as an example of what society has done to you. Just as it has taught you that because I take lives I must be some kind of monster. Just as it has taught you that your ephemeral life here on earth is so precious you must cling to it even when it is perfectly evident that your time is coming to an end.”

“I-I don’t want to die!”

“Darling,” he said, leaning close and whispering, “your life on earth is over. But because of my work, because of your sacrifice, we will all be translated to a better world, a happier one. We will leave behind this earthly plane of disappointment, discontent, and disillusionment. We will usher in a Golden Age.”

She trembled so much it was difficult for her to speak clearly. “Is-that-why I’m strapped to this table?”

“I would like to believe you have the strength to remain in position when the pendulum begins its final descent. That you would not run or attempt to save yourself. But the flesh is weak, even when the spirit is willing. And so much is at stake. I felt a few precautions were in order.”

“Where are my friends?” Her eyes followed the blade, back and forth, back and forth. It was so close now it never escaped her line of sight.

“They are in other rooms. Enjoying similar experiences I’ve devised for their delectation.”

She stared at the blade, barely an inch away now. “Is it going to hurt very much?”

“Yes,” he said, stroking her brow, “I’m afraid it is.” He pushed to his feet. “It’s almost time. I’ll leave you alone now.”

She quivered, then rocked hysterically, crying, wailing. And the pendulum kept swinging. She screamed hysterically. “Stop it! Please help me! Please!”

The pendulum swung again and this time she felt it crease her exposed flesh. She cried out. But it did not stop. Again it swung and again it cut her. A thin line of blood trickled to the surface. She cried out uncontrollably, insanely, crazed, her eyes wild with frenzy. The next pass would be the one, she knew. The next swing of the pendulum would kill her.

“Please, God! Someone! Help me!”

The pendulum descended even lower, sweeping toward her chest-

Then stopped.

She was so hysterical she couldn’t hold still. She arched her back and twisted, flinging herself from one side to the other, straining against her bonds, as if she’d lost all sense of time or place, all reason, all sanity.

Above her, holding the pendulum barely an inch from her breast, the Raven smiled.

28

The only thing more frustrating than knowing a killer is on the loose and not being able to do anything about it is knowing a killer is on the loose and not having anything to do. I was totally stymied. Waiting for reports. Waiting for lab results. Waiting for someone to give me the magic piece of information that would allow me to catch the miserable table-strapping picture-taking bastard once and for all. But that magic bullet was not forthcoming.

I thumbed through the stack of information that had trickled across my desk. They still hadn’t gotten a fix on who owned or had built the cabin out by the dam. Speculation was that hunters or fishers had slapped it together, maybe dug the basement to store or cure fresh kills. Edgar found it and took it over. Maybe killed the original occupants, who knows? There were few other dwellings in the area, and they had found no one who had any knowledge of who lived there. Some of the new FBI personnel working the case had managed to track down the identity of two of the girls found in Edgar’s basement-two out of twenty-two-by comparing the physical remains against old missing-persons reports in the FBI database. They were both runaways, both last seen in small towns in northern California about six months before. Although it was difficult to make reliable determinations about bodies so decomposed, the coroner believed they had been killed first, then brought to the shack sometime afterward. The logical conclusion was that our Edgar had a previous life-one in which he buzzed up and down the coast killing helpless girls, then dumped their corpses back here. All before the Poe motif fully developed.

I was feeling better. Not 100 percent, not even close, but given what that bastard put me through, I was pretty damn solid. I called Rachel, but she was out. Basketball game. Seems the team was still undefeated and if they won another game would be guaranteed a spot in the play-offs. Bully for them.

Called Lisa, too, but she was not at home.

Found a book on the corner of my desk, one I’d forgotten about in all the turmoil following my abduction. Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose-Poem. The only Poe I hadn’t read yet, as far as I knew. And weird as all get-out.

I opened the book and started to read. It was hard going. Strange. Poe as writer qua astrophysicist. Lots of cosmological theorizing, but couched in unscientific, poetic language that made it extremely difficult to follow. I’d read Poe’s bio-he was no scientist. Why had he written this? It was like Carl Sagan on an acid trip.

I had to reread a passage three times-some babble about irresistibly attractive forces-before I got any sense of what he was talking about. Then it occurred to me that what he was describing, an enormously powerful force in space sucking everything toward it, sounded a lot like a black hole. Did we know about those in Poe’s day?

Then there was the passage in the coded message Edgar sent us: From that one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.

Which, placed in context, sounded for all the world like the big-bang theory, once I read it over about six times and decoded some of the nonscientific terminology. My history of science was sketchy, but I thought that idea came later, that in Poe’s era people were still mostly buying into the Adam and Eve bit. How could Poe know this?

Normally, I tried to empathize with a living, breathing person, but this time, I let my mind wander into the psyche of this writer, long dead, who had penned this bizarre work. What was he trying to accomplish? And what did Edgar-our Edgar-get out of it? Why was this book so significant to him that he led us to it? It was baffling.

Until I started to see a weird sort of pattern emerging, a secret latticework woven between the sentences. And some disturbingly familiar terminology. Dream-Land. Ascension. Golden Age.

That was when I started to get it.

I was so absorbed in my reading I didn’t even notice the woman standing at the other end of my desk. She had to clear her throat, then drum her fingers.

“Thallium.”

I looked up. It was Jennifer Fuentes, the toxicologist.

I squinted. “You’re saying I need Valium? Do I seem stressed?”

“Not Valium. Thallium. A deadly poison.”

I pulled my head out of the book. “And the reason you’re saying this is…”

“I found it in Fara Spencer’s mouth, just like the O’Bannon kid predicted. I used a wide range of reagents for different hard-to-detect poisons. Thallium clicked. The spectrophotometer confirmed it. It had broken down, as any poison would over that period of time. So to double-check, I put the sample in a graphite tube and heated it to vaporize the poison. Put it under the blue light. Voilà. Thallium. Judging from what was left more than a week after her death, I’d say it was a significant dosage.”

“Enough to kill her?”

“Oh, yeah. Instantly.”

“So he took the heart out after she was dead.”

“I think so. Immediately thereafter, before the blood had a chance to coagulate.”

“But she wouldn’t have felt the pain.”

“Not if she was dead.”

Of course not. He’d captured her, sure. Probably terrorized her, just like he did me. And he’d taken the heart, because that’s what Poe wanted him to do, and that’s what he wanted to mail to me. But he couldn’t do it while she was alive. She wasn’t an offering, and outside of his twisted plan for redemption, he lacked the requisite cruelty. Or at least one of his personalities did.

And Darcy had known it all along.

“Tell me about thallium, Doc. Is it hard to get, like that voodoo zombie stuff?”

She shook her head. “Rat poison, most likely. Contains thallium sulphate. Half the people in Vegas probably have it in their garage, never suspecting how deadly it can be.”

“But Edgar would know. Edgar knows everything.”

“I feel like an idiot. I would’ve missed it altogether if it hadn’t been for that kid.”

“Don’t feel bad, Doc. You were meant to miss it.”

Jennifer walked humbly back to her office and I returned to my reading.

I’m getting close to you, Edgar, I thought. I was still missing a few key pieces of information, but it was starting to fall into place, like snowflakes on a Colorado mountaintop. And the few things I didn’t know yet, I knew where to find.

In this book.

There was a reason why Edgar was who he was, why he did what he did. And I was going to discover it. Before his damned Day of Ascension. Before it was too late.

Who are you? Where did you come from?

29

“Please, Nana, please. We’ll be careful.”

“No. You’re too young. You children should stay near the house.”

“We’re old enough. Honest.”

“Ernie, I’ve given you my answer.”

“But Nana!”

The twins had lived with their grandmother for almost a month before she relented, on a bright summer morning when the California air was so cool and the sun so warm even she must’ve found the temptation irresistible. Her small rural house backed up against a forest full of brush and hidden dangers, maple and oak and tall pines, redwoods and relicts of redwoods. Even better, not a quarter mile beyond the forest was a vast expanse of beach, a private access road to the Pacific Ocean. Nana’s family had bought this choice land not far from Salinas at the turn of the century and never let it go, even though they were poor as dirt and it came to be worth a substantial sum. But what good did it do the twins if they weren’t allowed to leave the house?

“I want you children where I can see you. No telling what kinds of mischief you might get into.” She had a cat in her arms, a huge peach-colored Maine coon that stared at Ernie with eyes that never blinked. “I know what you were up to when your parents weren’t watching and I won’t have any of it. You just stay put.”

“But there’s nothing to do in the yard!”

“And what is it you think you’re going to do in the forest? Don’t you know that place is full of ticks? Poison ivy? Do you know what poison ivy looks like? I’ll bet you don’t. You get a dose of that and you’ll be miserable for days. Snakes out there, too.”

Ernie was unconvinced.

“Did I tell you about the wild boars? My mother saw one, just before the Lord took her home. Teeth like razors. Could eat little things like you two in a single gulp.”

But Ernie did not relent. To him, the forest was an unexplored wonderland teeming with adventure. Even from a distance he could see its dark and foreboding corners, and the mystery made it all the more alluring.

“We could play lots of games in there. We could build forts and play hide-and-seek.”

“You can do all that in the yard.”

“Not good. Not like we could there.”

Nana’s eventual surrender was inevitable, given how both Ernie and Ginny pounded her with the relentlessness only eight-year-olds can muster. “But just for one hour. And I want you to carry this tin whistle. You get in any trouble, meet up with a wild boar or something, you blow on it, hard. And when you get back, I’ll be inspecting you for ticks.”

“All right, Nana. We will, Nana,” he said, throwing himself up against her and hugging her tightly.

“That’s enough of that,” she said, pushing him away.

“And what about the beach? Can we go there, too?”

“Under no circumstances are you to go near the beach. I couldn’t hear you out there even if you did blow that whistle. Now get along, before I change my mind.”

“Yes, Nana,” he said, already running.

And so the revels began. They were like pagans, Ginny and Ernie, romping through the forest, worshiping each other and secret gods known to no one but themselves. They would pretend to be astronauts on another planet searching for new life-forms and alien civilizations. They would play endless games of chase. There were no other children living anywhere near them, and they never minded in the least. They were a world unto themselves.

On some afternoons, Ernie’s favorite ones, after the running and chasing were done, they would sit together on their makeshift table, a huge stump of a tree that had been logged a generation before. Hidden amidst the maple and second-growth redwoods, they would tell each other everything. They had no secrets. Why would they? Each was an extension of the other. As far as they were concerned, they were two parts of the same person.

“Do you ever miss Mom and Dad?” Ginny asked, one such afternoon.

“I dunno.” He stretched out, sunning himself. “Kinda sorta. You?”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“I don’t miss Mom yelling all the time.”

“No.”

“And I don’t miss Daddy’s spankings. Which really weren’t spankings because they weren’t on my butt.”

“He never spanked me.”

“That’s ’cause he liked you. He spanked me all the time. He just liked you.”

“Yeah,” she said, drawing her arms inward as she spoke, staring at the leaves. “He sure did like me.”

“I hated it when they acted all weird and crazy and couldn’t hardly walk.”

“Me too. But that was when Daddy liked me the most.”

“And Nana’s pretty nice. Even if she is old and kinda strange.”

“Yeah.”

The breeze blew a trace of honeysuckle between them, rustling the leaves and giving them both a slight chill.

“But I still miss Mom and Daddy. Sometimes,” Ginny said quietly.

“Yeah. Me too, I guess.”

True to her word, when they returned from the forest each day, their grandmother performed full and thorough inspections.

“Those ticks are insidious. They dig down deep and they never let go. Strip!”

And she meant it. The inspection did not begin until both children were standing before her starkers. “No underwear. Nothing.” Now they really looked like wild animals, primordial wood nymphs, hair tangled and full of leaves, even bugs, dirt sweat-stained to their skin. Their grandmother checked each nook and cranny, every fold and orifice. The children didn’t much enjoy this assessment. But it did not deter them. Next day, they were back in the forest.

“Do you want to touch it?”

He had seen her looking at him while he went to the bathroom behind a tree. It was not the first time.

“No way. Gross.”

“Isn’t gross. It’s just me.”

“Well, I don’t have anything like that.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a girl.”

They sat on the stump in silence for a few moments. He knew what she was thinking. It was always like that, and not just with her. He could tell what anyone was thinking, sometimes before they knew themselves. And he knew Ginny’s mind as well as he knew his own.

“Okay,” she said, something like fifteen minutes later, out of the blue.

“Okay what?”

“Okay I want to touch it.”

He considered. “You’ll have to let me touch yours.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Well, whatever you got, I want to touch it.”

“Okay.”

Ernie dropped his shorts. And his Sears-bought Underoos, which drooped over his shoes.

And she touched it.

“That wasn’t so much,” she remarked, then giggled. “It’s all sticking out now.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Why’s it doing that? Just ’cause I touched it?”

“You didn’t do it right,” he said defensively. “You’re s’posed to kiss it.”

“How would you know?”

“I saw it in one of Dad’s books. You kiss it and it makes people happy.”

She obliged. Afterward, he did the same to her. It was weird and gooshy.

Later that day, when the inspection was done, their grandmother kept Ernie after she let Ginny get dressed and go up to her room.

“I saw what you did,” Nana said. “You nasty little boys with your nasty little things, you’re all alike. Well, I won’t have it. You understand me? I won’t have it.”

“Y-Y-Yes, Nana,” he managed to squeeze out.

The cat curled around his grandmother’s ankles, staring at him with large accusing eyes.

“There will be no nastiness on my property, hear me? Your father may have gone in for that sort of thing, but I most certainly will not. The Good Lord doesn’t like it. And neither do I.”

“Okay, Nana.”

“Nasty. Nasty, ugly boys. Here. Put this on.” She held out a sky-blue pinafore, one of Ginny’s.

“But-that’s a dress-”

“Put it on!” she commanded. He obeyed. She did up the buttons in the back, tied the bow, and spun him around a few times, admiring him. “There, that’s better. Not so nasty now, are we?”

“But Nana-”

“Since you’re so interested in girls, we’ll let you be one from now on.”

“Nana-”

“Go to bed now. And leave the dress on. You are not to remove it until I give you permission. Understand?”

He did as he was told, but the dress was scratchy and uncomfortable and he had a hard time sleeping. She made him wear it forever, days, weeks, including the night one of Nana’s lady friends from town came over. Nana thought the children didn’t know because the lady came after bedtime, as she had come many times before. But the dress bothered Ernie so much he couldn’t sleep, and when he heard screaming, it scared him. Scared him so much he ran into Nana’s bedroom.

“What the hell is this?” the lady said, sitting up in the bed.

Nana leaped out of her bed, wrapping a sheet around herself. “Nasty little boy! Nasty little boy!”

“Nana, I was scared-”

“Did you think you might see something? Is that what you were hoping for? That you might see something nasty?”

“No-I-I-”

“I tried to help you. I tried to make you not be such a dirty little boy. But I can see this dress wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.” Enraged, she ripped it off him, her nails like claws, then ran to a sewing kit resting on her dresser.

“Nana, please-”

“My last sewing needle,” she said, holding the silver shaft between thumb and finger. “Shame to have to use it like this. But what’s got to be done’s got to be done.”

She lowered the needle and jabbed it into his little penis.

Ernie screamed. He tried to squirm away, but the old woman’s hand held him firmly in place. Only after an eternity had passed did she yank the needle out, leaving a trickle of clear fluid in its wake.

Ernie clutched himself. He fell to the floor, curled up, hoping if he squeezed hard enough it wouldn’t hurt anymore.

“I don’t want you playing with Ginny. Not in the forest. Not anywhere.”

His eyes widened with horror. This was even worse, the most horrible punishment possible. “B-B-B-But-”

“You heard me, boy.” She held the dripping needle between her fingers. “Do I need to tell you what will happen if you disobey me?”

“N-N-N-No, ma’am.”

She would not help him or allow the lady in her bed to help him. Ernie had to crawl to his bedroom, holding himself, biting back the pain. He lay on his bed for hours, not sleeping, empty, devastated, in every kind of agony. A swelling began and he didn’t know what to do about it. He started to cry, and once he started, he found he could not stop. His whole body shook with the force of his tears. He did not cry so much for the aching, although that was great. He cried for Ginny. Because she was his life. And now his grandmother had taken his life away.

The next few weeks were torturous. The swelling eventually subsided, but in its wake the shaft of his penis turned an odd mottled color and bent to the left as if it were permanently broken. He was not allowed to play with Ginny or even to talk to her. He sat at the opposite end of the breakfast table and if he so much as glanced her way his grandmother made a motion toward her sewing kit. He learned to stare at his cereal bowl. At night he would lie awake in his bed, sleepless, thinking of nothing but her.

“Ernie?”

He sat bolt upright, on that memorable night so long into their forced separation.

It was her.

“Come outside.”

It was dark as a cave in his room. What time was it, midnight? Later?

“Hurry!” He heard her tiny footsteps scampering down the stairs.

He followed, feeling his still broken member as he climbed out of bed, knowing all too well what he risked. But Ginny was calling, and he could not resist following her.

The floorboards creaked as he entered the hallway. He could hear his grandmother snoring; she was sound asleep. But he also knew how quickly she could rouse herself, given sufficient motivation.

Down the stairs and out the door. He found Ginny by the clearing at the edge of the forest, waiting for him.

“I’m not sure we should be in the forest at night,” he said, even though he desperately wanted to go. “It could be dangerous. The ticks and boars and stuff. We might not see them.”

“We’re not going to the forest,” she said, her eyes sparkling like a gift. “We’re going through it. To the beach.”

The beach! He felt a clutching at his heart. Their grandmother had expressly forbidden it. “Nana won’t like this. If she finds out-”

“Nana won’t find out.” She took his hand. “If she does, we’ll run away together.”

She led the way through the edge of the forest on a worn path that seemed safe even when they were traveling with only the moon for a flashlight. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, they arrived at the beach.

Ernie was stunned. He had seen it from the road, of course, but never like this, never this close. Even from the edge of the forest, he could feel the spray on his cheeks. He could hear the thunderous roar. It was so loud-how could they not hear it back at the house? The waves crashed against the surf with a shuddering violence. The ocean seemed to go on forever and forever, receding into the horizon.

“Better build a fort fast,” Ginny said, racing barefoot across the sand. “You’re about to be under attack.”

They played together like they had never played before. In retrospect, they were probably not there more than an hour or two, but it seemed a glorious eternity, a Golden Age. They built forts and lobbed sandballs at one another. They fashioned castles and dug tunnels between them. They played chase and ran like the sea breeze, squeezing the sand between their toes. Ernie caught her and they both tripped; he fell down on top of her.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked as he lay against her, sand skimming her hair.

“Of course you are.”

“I think my nose is too big.”

“Is not. You’re pretty.”

“Then how come you never kiss me?”

“I-I didn’t know if-if I-”

“It’s okay.”

If she said it was okay, then so it must be. He pressed his lips against hers, hard, like he’d seen his father do it to that woman in the drugstore. It didn’t feel very warm, but it made him go all tingly and stiff just the same.

“That wasn’t very good, was it?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, laughing. She pushed him away and ran free. “You’ll get better.”

And she was right. They came out to the beach every night that week, running and playing, hugging and kissing, happier than they had ever been before, in their kingdom by the sea.

They were always quiet when they left, always careful to brush the sand off themselves before they returned home. They gave their grandmother no cause for suspicion or alarm. Ernie was deliriously happy, and each night seemed more intense, more momentous than the one before. But he could never entirely shake his sense of foreboding. He knew that what they were doing was wrong, or at least that their grandmother would think so. Didn’t that mean they would be punished? Would she return to her sewing basket? Would she hurt him again?

What he did not realize was that his punishment, when it came, would be ever so much worse.

“Ginny, look out! It’s a big one!”

The wave crashed down on them, huge and impenetrable as a wall, knocking Ernie off his feet. “Ginny!”

He scrambled up, fighting the pounding of the water, but his feet sank into the sand. “Ginny!”

She had been digging a tunnel when last he’d seen her, burrowing through the sand, connecting his castle to hers. He called and called for her, but she did not answer him.

“Ginny!” Another wave crashed down on him. Ernie choked on the stale salt water, coughing and spewing up something gray and bitter. He had been daydreaming, not paying attention, still tasting his sister’s salty kisses on his lips. Now he was soaked, mired down in the sand. And she wasn’t answering.

“Ginny!”

He struggled to make his way to the two castles and found a half-dug tunnel between them. Ginny’s feet were sticking out of the sand. Her head was buried somewhere beneath.

The tide had come in while she was burrowing. The tunnel had collapsed and she’d been buried, unable to escape.

He began digging as fast as he could, pulling out great clumps of wet sand, trying to find her head, but it was slow work for little hands. He knew every second counted. He called out her name again and again, crying into the night wind, but there was never any response.

He didn’t know how long it took, a minute, twenty, he couldn’t tell. He excavated her head and finally managed to roll her out of the muck. He brushed sand from her mouth, her nose, her eyes, all the while screaming out her name.

Her eyes remained closed.

He opened her mouth and blew air into it like he’d seen people do on television, but she did not respond. He was scared and alone and he didn’t know what to do. He raced back and forth on the beach, the death clock ticking away in his brain.

He had to get help. Grown-up help. He started running toward the house, racing recklessly through the forest. His legs and feet were cut in a dozen places but he never stopped, never for a second. What would he do when he got there? If he told Nana what he had done, what they had been doing-he knew what would happen. But Ginny wasn’t moving. He had to do something. He had to do something.

As soon as he arrived at the house, he called the police. They were the ones best able to help Ginny-and perhaps to protect him. Nana heard him talking and came downstairs, but the police arrived before she could do anything to him.

Ernie found it difficult to function, to perform even the simplest tasks. He was weary and heartsore and scared and confused. He answered the policemen’s questions as best he could and took them out to the beach.

“Dear God,” the cop said when they finally arrived. “Why didn’t you call us sooner, son? We might’ve saved her.”

The rest of the night was a hideous blur. There were questions and questions and questions. He was still wet and cold and miserable. And all the while, his grandmother stared at him, her eyes dark as coals and cold as night. He knew what she was thinking.

Around three A.M., they took Ginny’s body away. They would not let him kiss her goodbye. He would never see her again.

Ernie didn’t know who all these people were. He’d never known Nana had any friends; only her nighttime lady friends came to the house. But at the reception after the funeral, the place was packed with strangers.

No one would talk to him, not at the funeral and not now. He knew why. Some of them thought maybe he’d done it on purpose. They thought he was a bad seed, a chip off his father’s block. They blamed him not only for Ginny’s death but for his grandmother’s sudden decline. Everything.

Someone had brought food, a couple of casseroles and some bean salad, but he didn’t eat much, even though he’d taken nothing all day. The first bite died in his throat; it seemed tasteless.

The minister was the only person there who didn’t have wrinkles. He was new, maybe thirty. Ernie knew his grandmother didn’t like him. Ernie didn’t like him much, either. But he was the only one in the house who would talk to him.

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” Reverend Barton said. “God called her home, that’s all. She’s in heaven now, with the angels. We should be so fortunate.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” Ernie mumbled.

“It never does. We think, why did it have to be her? But remember-she went to be with Jesus. That’s a good thing, not bad. The Lord God moves in strange and mysterious ways. There is a plan, even if we have not yet discovered it. Evidently, God needed her more than we did.”

Ernie looked up at the minister, his eyes pleading. “What I don’t understand is, why didn’t God take me, too? We belong together.”

“You will be together again one day, God willing.”

“But why not now? I feel so-awful. I never should’ve gone out there with her.”

Reverend Barton knelt down and took the boy by the shoulders. “It’s not your fault, son. You were God’s instrument. You helped Him fulfill His plan.”

That night, she came for him.

“Ernie,” she said, standing in the dark at his bedroom door. The cat was curled between her ankles. “Wake up.”

“Can’t…,” he moaned, pretending he had been asleep.

She grabbed his head by the hair and jerked him upright. Ernie sputtered, wild-eyed, drool spilling from his lips.

He looked down at her other hand. She was holding the needle.

“Thought those damn fools would never leave.”

“Please don’t hurt me, Nana. It was so bad last time. Please don’t do it again.”

“You’re all alike,” she said, her eyes glistening like the silver dagger she held in her hand. “Your father took my first little girl away from me. And you took my next one.” She grabbed him by the collar of his pajamas, shaking him. “Did you do anything to her before you killed her?”

“No!”

“You disgusting men with your disgusting little things.” She shook him even harder. “Tell me the truth. What did you do to her? So help me, I’ll-”

“No!” He broke away, scrambling across the bed. He dove through the doorway but miscalculated in the darkness, banging his head on the wall. He leaped to his feet, stubbing his toe in the process. She reached out just in time to grab his leg.

“Gotcha!” She jabbed the needle into the soft underside of his foot.

Ernie shrieked, then tore himself away from her. He pushed ahead, but the cat raced in front of him and made him stumble. He collided with the banister, headfirst. She came after him, her teeth bared, her needle shining in the reflected moonlight.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he whimpered. “Please don’t.”

“You’ll take your punishment, Ernie. If I have to chase you to the ends of the earth. God punishes sinners. God and me.”

She reared up before him, her needle poised like a dagger.

Ernie kicked her in the stomach.

For a long moment, she seemed suspended in air. He could have grabbed her hand and pulled her back onto the landing. But the needle was in that hand.

He let her fall.

When at last her body stopped, the tumbled heap at the foot of the stairs did not stir.

Ernie moved quickly. He gathered together everything he wanted to save, threw it in a bag, and hid it in the forest. Then he killed the cat. He took his time about that, releasing much that had been pent up for so long, in a slow, protracted, highly gratifying dissection. Then he burned the house down.

The books he’d read had given him a good idea how to do it in such a way that it would not be obvious that he had done it, at least not to the rural cops he’d met a few days before. He left the gas burners on for a long time. He tossed a match. Then he went outside and watched it burn.

There was nothing they could do to him that wasn’t going to happen already. This way, no one would ever know for certain what happened. No one but him. And Virginia.

He was the Instrument, he murmured to himself as he watched the shutters and shingles turn to ash. Now he needed to find his God.

In and out of foster homes and reform schools all his teen years, Ernie never stayed in one place for long. Soon after he left his grandmother’s house he developed a stutter that plagued him until high school. The permanent deformity to his private member made gym class a nightmare and sports an impossibility. But he continued to search for some explanation, some meaning in his life, in the tragedy that had visited him. Which was what led him, during his sophomore year of college, to journey out into the desert to attempt a vision quest.

He had never seen such a desolate environment-flat, barren, bleak. Heat rose from the pavement creating miniature mirages, smoothing the road ahead. A man named Ralph Studi acted as his spiritual guide and instructor. The first three days, he learned, would be spent in preparation. The last four days he would spend in the desert, alone. “All this training will be geared toward one central objective-your spiritual growth. At all times, the emphasis will be on grounding you in the Spirit. Not just absorbing but owning the lessons learned. Because the true work of the vision quest begins when we return to our people.”

The first day on his own, out in the wilderness, he was bored to tears. The second day, he was starving-and bored to tears.

The third day, he saw the Raven.

He had fallen asleep, or thought he had. His legs were aching from the stiff sedentary drain of remaining in the sacred circle for so long. He kept the fire burning, even though the air was hot and oppressive, even at night. He longed to stretch his legs, to partake of the tiny ration of water he had been permitted. Sweat dripped down the sides of his face. His eyelids closed and he drank in the heady smell of smoke and whatever was in that wood they gave him to burn. He thought he was asleep. But when the Raven spoke to him, he was wide awake.

He couldn’t move. Somehow, the Raven had imparted a paralysis that he couldn’t shake.

“Why have you strayed from the Path?”

Ernie didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t believe he was talking to a raven, but there it was, perched on his shoulder. It wasn’t like other birds. It was larger, its face more expressive, more human. Its eyes terrified him.

“I-I didn’t know-”

“The Path was shown to you. But you have not followed it.”

“Well… I’ve been busy with classes and-”

“There are no excuses.”

“Look, just-just tell me what to do. I’ll do it. Really I will.”

“You know what to do.”

“I don’t. But if you could give me a little hint-”

“Nevermore!”The coal-black eyes flared, angry and intense. Ernie tried to inch away, but he was still unable to move. “I have been with Virginia.”

Ernie’s hunger was supplanted by an aching in his chest, a new emptiness. “You’ve seen her?”

“I have been with Virginia. And so could you.”

“But how-”

“In my realm, all are reunited. All are one.”

“I don’t know what that-”

“You have the potential for greatness. You could be what I am.”

“I-I’ll do whatever I must. Whatever you want.”

The Raven unfolded its wings and the span was endless, a dark umbra that spread from one perimeter of his vision to the other, swallowing him. He screamed, and somehow, the act of screaming ended the visitation. He was wide awake, able to move, fully conscious that he was alone in the middle of the desert.

But he was certain he had been visited by his totem, and that the visit had meant something. What was he was being called to do?

The sweat on his brow had vanished, replaced by a fevered chill. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, trying to warm himself. Something had changed, something inside him. He didn’t know how or what exactly. But he knew he would never be the same.

It was hard to avoid the sorrowful look in the eyes of all who shook Ernie’s hand as he left the questing headquarters. Word had gotten out. They all were aware that he had been visited by the Raven, the totem of death, and they all believed that meant he would soon be dead.

But Ernie knew differently. The Raven might be the totem of death, but not his own. This visitation had a different meaning.

He returned to school, ostensibly focusing on his studies, but obsessed with the Raven’s words, trying to uncover the mysteries of his path. He graduated with honors and became a teaching assistant while pursuing his Master’s in American Literature. But although he performed his appointed tasks with excellence, his heart was no longer in them. And his soul was in another place altogether.

He had not wanted to revisit the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He remembered those stories from his childhood as dark and gruesome, obviously the product of an unstable, demented mind. But he was TA-ing an American Lit survey course, and of course he had to grade the exams, and he couldn’t do that unless he refamiliarized himself with the texts. So he sat down in his room late one evening, alone as always, with a thick volume of Poe.

He had not intended to read the entire book. A few of the major works would do, surely. He started with the poems, lovely things, sonically immaculate, if rather syrupy. But so much of it reverberated in strange and unforeseen ways.

She was a child and I was a child in that kingdom by the sea…

Such love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me…

Had Poe really written that about his lost child bride? Could anyone but Ernie himself have written that?

It was only a short while before he reread Poe’s great masterpiece, “The Raven.” Eighteen immaculately rhymed quatrains, with the Raven as the harbinger of death. Could this possibly be a coincidence?

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting… just above my chamber door…

Ernie felt as if his brain had been opened wide. As if the sun had dawned for the first time. After the poems, he pored through the stories, over and over again. It was only after he had read them many times that he began to see beyond the superficial entertainments and realize that there was something important buried within them. The similarities, the points of correspondence, were too great to be coincidental. Just as the Raven had spoken to him, so it also must have spoken to Poe. He found a tantalizing clue in one of the worst of the tales, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”: It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge-some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Yes! And another story-“The Premature Burial”: To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

That was what the Raven was trying to tell him. Death was not an ending but a translation, a passage from one borderland to another. But this wasn’t a Christian fantasy, a heaven up in the clouds such as they spoke about in Sunday school. This was something real. The Dream-Land Poe described in his poems existed, and his sweet Virginia must be there. The narrator in “Ligeia” brought back his love. Could Ernie not do the same? But what was the mystic formula that the prophet hinted at but never described? How was this magnificent end to be accomplished? How could he enter Dream-Land? How could he make Poe’s Golden Age a reality?

The answer came to him in the December of that year, not from his intensive studies, not from his work, but from a purely adventitious discovery in a small coastal California town. In a used-book store, he found an obscure Poe work, something that hadn’t been in any of the anthologies. It was titled Eureka.

He had seen references to this work in some of the biographies he had consumed, but they were all brief and dismissive. A failed effort, they called it. A hopeless mishmash. It seemed useless and irrelevant, and for that reason, and because it wasn’t in any of his books anyway, he had never bothered to read it.

When he did, it gave him the answers he had so long sought. The path.

Poe believed in dreams, not just sleeping dreams but waking ones, believed they were glimpses into another world, a better world, one to which we could all be translated. He limned a memorable, if enticingly vague, portrait of this world in his poem “Dream-Land”: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Much of Eureka was concerned with Poe’s efforts to create a new cosmology, which was rejected by contemporaries because of his lack of scientific training, and yet in retrospect, some of what Poe wrote was positively prescient. Poe solved Olbers’s paradox-why the sky is dark at night-envisioned black holes, and was the first to describe the universe as expanding, then contracting. He proposed the big bang theory, which would not be formally discovered until seventy years later, by Alexander Friedmann, a Russian mathematician who was very fond of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

How had Poe known, long before the scientific observations had been made that could prove it?

The Raven told him, of course.

Poe believed that man was a mere extension of the Deity. He believed that as man shrinks into spatial nothingness he will regain his lost harmony and become absorbed into a perfect, mystical unity. He wrote: The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity [in death] ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is neither more nor less than the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.

After he read that passage, Ernie wept. He threw his hands up in the air, ecstatic, euphoric. He had wondered for so long, had needed to know. And all the while, the prophet had been trying to tell him.

These were not mere stories, mere poems. They were blueprints.

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t get this Poe stuff. I mean, I know he was great and brilliant and all, but to me, it just seems gross.”

Ernie was in his tiny TA’s office, opening his mail, trying to appear interested.

“I guess, I grew up in the suburbs, you know what I’m saying? We didn’t have guys sealing each other up in the basement or swinging big pendulums over their chests. And what was the deal with that story where the guy yanked out that woman’s teeth? I mean, this Poe guy had issues, if you ask me.”

Ernie tried to smile. She was a tiny thing, presumably eighteen, but she looked younger. She had a round face and large eyes and long, straight blond hair. He knew she had a reputation as a partyer. She wore far too much makeup. “So what, pray tell, can I do for you, Miss Swanson?”

She shifted from one side of the chair to the other, crossing her legs. “See, I know the final is supposed to be like, final, but I think I didn’t do so hot on it.”

“Why do you believe that?”

“Well… I never finished the reading. I mean, I’m sorry, but those stories were just so wrong.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Yeah, but my sorority is counting on me to keep up the academic average, and I wondered if there wasn’t some way I could… make it up.”

“I’m afraid Professor Levy doesn’t give second chances.”

“Would he have to know?”

“I could hardly offer a makeup exam without his authorization.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about another test.” She slithered off the chair and onto her knees, just before him. “I was hoping I could make it up… some other way.”

“Miss Swanson, I’m sure I don’t know…”

“Come on,” she said, rubbing her hands up and down his pant legs. “I know you pretend to be above it all with your big words and your old-fashioned suits. But I’ll bet there’s a real man in there somewhere.”

“Miss Swanson, this-this is most inappropriate.”

“Sure?” She unzipped the fly of his pants.

“Miss Swanson!”

“Come on. I’ll do you a favor, you do me one.” Her hand reached inside his pants. “And I’ll bet-” She stopped, choked. “Oh, my God! What’s wrong with you?”

Ernie hurriedly tucked himself back inside. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing! It’s gross!”

“I had an accident. When I was a child.”

She stepped away from him, her face stricken. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be cruel. I was just-startled.” She waved her hand back and forth, as if fanning the air. “Look, let’s just forget it.”

“But-you said-”

“I can do a lot, but I can’t do that. I’ll just take the D.”

“Nevermore?” he whispered.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. But he heard the Raven speaking to him, loud, insistent, and he saw the girl, so like Poe’s own, and he felt his shame and embarrassment, and he was desperate to find the path, to know what it was he was supposed to do. And a moment later, the letter opener was jutting out from her left temple. She was dead in seconds.

“You have done well,”the Raven intoned. “You have begun your journey. But there is still much to be done. Much to be discovered.”

And so Ernie quit his position at the college and trolled up and down the coast of California, through Montana, then Nevada, refining his prowess and technique as he traveled, finally making his way to Las Vegas, where the final secrets were revealed to him, and the countdown to Ascension could begin at last.

30

“So what you’re basically telling us is, Edgar is Jesus Christ?” Granger wheezed.

“In his mind, yes.” I was back in the classroom again, except this time it was packed beyond capacity, not only with Granger’s increasingly sizable team, but with all the new FBI agents on the case, most of whom I hadn’t formally met. And here I was lecturing these feds, debriefing them as if I were some kind of behavioral genius. Patrick had gracefully allowed me to take the lead, thereby ensuring that I would be kept in the loop and given a decent modicum of respect. But this case was federal now. We were still allowed to play. But they owned the sandbox.

“This stuff is all fine for the college professor crowd,” Granger said, “but how is it going to help us catch the guy?”

“If you don’t understand who he is, you’ll never get him. You spent valuable man-hours last week having your men blanket all the S &M clubs and similar places Edgar would never dream of visiting.”

“One of his victims worked in an S &M club!”

“He went there because his victim of choice was there. That’s no indication that he liked it. I’ll bet he hated it and left as soon as possible.”

“Excuse me.” This came from one of the agents in the front row. “In your opinion, will he continue to abduct only girls with given names found in the works of Poe?”

“Frankly, no.” I saw their looks of disappointment-one of the few useful leads lost. But I had to give them the straight scoop. “Too restrictive, now that everyone knows. He won’t be able to find an Annabel this side of the Rocky Mountains. And let’s not forget about his last victim-there are no Faras in Poe. I think we have to assume he’s over that, or that he’s taking different instructions from whatever voice is talking to him now.”

“I read your report on the Eureka book,” he commented. “Fascinating. Do you have any idea what he might be planning to do? To bring about this Golden Age?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. Except that it will have something to do with Poe. The connection may be mostly in his mind. But there will be one.”

“And do you have any theory about when this might happen?”

“According to that last phone call, he’s already started.”

He scribbled something into his notepad. “I assume someone has reviewed the missing-persons reports?”

“Yes, but remember, this is Vegas. There were eighteen missing-persons reports filed last night. Four of them concerned teenage girls.”

“Any likely suspects?”

“A group of three. Wandered away from a cheerleader clinic. No one has seen them since.”

“Three? At one time?”

I nodded grimly. “As I said, Edgar’s actions will escalate. Until his plan is completed. During the phone call, he spoke of a day of ascension-when something big was going to happen, something that would change everything. I called some of the local Christian churches. They say Easter is generally considered the day of ascension. But since this is October, I doubt if that’s Edgar’s target date. He’s planning his own ascension, on his own timetable. Like any other self-respecting savior.”

The Feeb almost smiled. “Does this put us in the role of Judas Iscariot?”

I returned the expression. “I’ll be happy to kiss the man on the cheek. Next time I see him.”

During the drive to Carson City, Darcy read police reports to me. It was funny listening to him, and not just because of that uninflected voice. His vocabulary was incredible; we never hit a word he didn’t know. But his pronunciation was often far from the mark. I got the impression he had done a good deal more reading than he’d done talking. I suppose he wasn’t the first person to find books more comfortable than other people. But I still liked being with him, and I know he liked being with me. And that felt good.

“Did you know there are over nine hundred missing-persons reports filed in Clark County each year?” he asked as he shuffled between files.

“Your point being?”

He was staring at a group of photographs. The cheerleaders. “They seem like nice girls, don’t you think? I hope the Bad Man doesn’t do anything mean to them.”

Poor sweet Darcy. “I could be wrong. But how else do you explain their disappearance?”

“Spontaneous combustion?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“White slavery ring? Did you know that white slavery rings are still active in Kuwait and many Middle Eastern nations? But I don’t know about Las Vegas.”

“Let’s hope that isn’t it.” What kind of books did O’Bannon have in that library? “I can’t be certain, Darcy. But my instincts tell me Edgar grabbed these girls. And I’ve learned to trust my instincts.”

“Me too,” Darcy said, surprising the hell out of me. “You’re usually right.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

“Ninety-three point six six percent of the time so far.”

“Thanks, Spock.” I wasn’t going to ask how he’d calculated that. Or what he considered to be my mistakes.

His head tilted to one side. “You smell good today.”

“I do? Oh-you mean no coffee breath.”

“Uh-uh. Something else.”

And I guess I knew what that was, too. I’d made it through the night again without taking a drink. And I could do it again. I knew I could. I had the strength now. And the really strange thing was that I knew I was getting that strength-at least in part-from Darcy.

“I didn’t like that funny smell. I like Susan smell better.”

Good thing I knew he was autistic. Otherwise I might have him arrested.

We didn’t know that Tiffany was dead. But I still found my voice choking, my eyes tingling, throughout the interview. Was this the first time I’d done something like this since David? Or perhaps, was this the first time I’d done something like this sober since David?

“It seemed such an innocent, harmless activity,” Mrs. Glancy said. “Cheerleading camp. What could happen?”

It’s not your fault, I wanted to tell the woman. But it wasn’t my place. “The team sponsor says she and the others disappeared after dinner. Around nine.”

“And that is so unlike Tiffany.” She dabbed her eyes. She was medium-sized and of medium weight, with a pleasant face that had probably aged twenty years in the last twenty hours. She did all the talking. Her husband was a physician, and like most doctors I had encountered, words were not his best thing. He sat beside her, not speaking, barely moving. Stunned.

Tiffany was their only child.

“She’s never run off before?”

“Of course not,” the mother said. “Tiffany is a good girl. Responsible. She’s on the honor roll, you know.”

“I, um, didn’t.”

“She’s not just some dumb blond cheerleader,” her father said, speaking for the first time. Apparently this was a point he felt compelled to make. “She had a real head on her shoulders.”

“And so kind,” the woman continued. “So considerate of others.” Her face flattened for a moment. “I’ll bet it was that JJ’s idea. I never cared much for her.”

“That was one of her friends, right?” I checked my files. “One of the other cheerleaders who disappeared.”

“I often told Tiffany she should be more careful. People judge you by your friends. But you know girls that age. They don’t listen. Do you have a girl that age?”

“Niece,” I offered.

“Oh, well then, you know. They don’t listen. Not a bit. Even the smart ones.”

Darcy sat in an overstuffed chair, picking at the armrest. I knew he was uncomfortable. All this misery-he absorbed it like a sponge. He might not understand emotion, but in a way, that could increase the discomfort of being around it. I just hoped he wouldn’t have another breakdown. I couldn’t deal with that now.

“Does she have any friends in Las Vegas?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Does she have an interest in gambling?”

“Of course not.”

“Rock and roll? There are several rock stars playing the Strip this week.”

“She’s more interested in Broadway. Show tunes, you know.”

“Does she like to… dress up?” Had to tread carefully here. But I hadn’t forgotten that Helen had a secret life her mother knew nothing about. It was possible this one did, too. Possible they both made the same mistake that put them in Edgar’s clutches.

“Dress up? How?”

“Oh… provocatively. Sexy.”

“My Tiffany would never do that.”

I had to push. “Those cheerleading skirts are usually pretty short.”

“That’s entirely different. That’s a sign of school spirit.”

Mmmm. “You think she’d have any interest in sex clubs?”

Mrs. Glancy clutched her bosom. “I-I-never-!” She looked at her husband, who was no use at all. “Are you planning to help our Tiffany or destroy her reputation?”

“I’m planning to find her, ma’am. And that means I need to know as much about her as possible.”

Dad cleared his throat. “I think maybe I should call Dick Conners.”

The family lawyer, no doubt. That would gum up the works. And frankly, I didn’t have the time. Not with the clock on these girls already ticking. “Does she have any hobbies? Interests?”

The woman was still glaring at me, but she eventually answered. “She likes to collect Dumbo figurines. You know, the flying elephant. She must have a hundred of them. And she wants to be a policewoman.”

That’s one you didn’t hear every day. “Tiffany wants to be a cop?”

“Yes. Especially after nine-eleven. She always has been very respectful, even worshipful, around our public servants. Heroes, she calls them. Police, firefighters. All that.”

A cheerleading policewoman. Couldn’t hurt. “Is she friendly? Outgoing? Would she talk to strangers?”

“Very friendly. But I would hope she has the sense not to talk to someone she doesn’t know. Especially in Las Vegas.”

I folded up my notepad. This was getting nowhere. Time to search the girls’ room. They would protest-I might even have to sit through a phone call to Dick Conners-but eventually they would relent. Because whatever their faults or foibles, they wanted their little girl back. And they knew the longer she was gone, the less likely that became. As did I.

It was nice being with Susan again. She’s almost like she used to be before the Bad Man took her but sometimes her hands shake and I can tell her stomach hurts and she looks like she’s going to cry but her smell is better and she’s back and she let me read to her while she drove the car. I wish I could drive the car but they wouldn’t let me get a license and I know I could do it but not unless they let me try and maybe Susan would let me after we catch the Bad Man and her hands don’t shake so much anymore. I know she likes me. I know she likes me.

Next time I’m going to ask her about babies.

Tiffany was the strongest, as it turned out. Who would have guessed that the spoiled rich girl would be the most resilient of the threesome? Hidden depths, he supposed. Dark secrets such as the prophet often saw lurking just beneath the surface. But those depths held dangers. They had to be eliminated.

He’d taken her through the entire “Pit and the Pendulum” scenario, just as he had the other two. But whereas Judy and JJ had disintegrated into hysteria, Tiffany had kept hold of her senses, even after the blade gave her a few rather significant slices. She had remained defiant, even through her pain.

Additional measures were required.

When Tiffany awoke, she found herself strapped to the table, still naked. It was amazing, he noted, how nakedness and physical discomfort increased their vulnerability. He had made the room positively frigorific, so much so that her body was covered with goose pimples.

“Good morning, Tiffany.”

“You can’t hurt me,” she said through dry and cracked lips.

“I’m glad to hear that, my dear. It will make what I have to do next so much less trying. Are my hands cold?”

He pressed the palms of both hands down on her abdomen. She flinched.

“I feared they might be. Hard to keep warm this time of year. The temperature is having a rather remarkable effect on your body.”

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, you sick fuck, but it isn’t going to work! I’ll never do what you want. If you’re going to rape me, then go ahead and do it. Get your filthy rocks off so I can get out of here!”

“My dear Tiffany, you mistake my intentions altogether. And you have a mouth like a sewer.”

“You’re a disgusting little creep. I bet your thing is just as short as you are. That’s probably why you have to get your thrills hurting teenage girls.”

“My darling-”

“Where’re Judy and JJ? What have you done to them?”

“They’re in another room.”

“Are you torturing them, too?”

“Not at all. They’re being quite compliant. Only you are-”

“Then let me see them!”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible yet. But in time-”

She twisted and strained against the straps, trying with all her might to get free.

He laid a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back to the table. “You’ve cut yourself.” He pointed to an abrasion across her left breast, just above the nipple.

“It was your damned pendulum, you-”

“Looks nasty. Could be infected. Needs attention.”

“Leave me alone!”

“Fear not, I know just the thing.” He lifted a bucket and placed it on the edge of the table where she could just see it. “Heavy. Needs to be stirred.” He took a large wooden ladle and swirled it through what appeared to be a thick gray muck. “There. That’s better.”

“What is that? What are you going to do with it? Are you going to put that on me?”

“Of course not. This is not the salve. This is but the living environment.” He dipped the ladle into the bucket, this time just skimming the surface.

It came back with something.

He brought the ladle around so that she could see it, letting a splotch of gray goo splash down on her neck. It was small, thin, and writhing, greenish black in color. As he held it close to her face, the putrid smell made her turn away.

“What the hell is that?”

“Don’t you know, Tiffany? It’s the best thing for an infection. In the prophet’s time, all the best physicians used them, a practice that has sadly fallen out of favor.” He leaned in closer, pressing the lip of the ladle against her cheek. “It’s a leech.”

“Get it away from me!”

“No, no, you don’t understand. It’s a good little creature. It’ll clean your wounds. Suck out the poison.”

“I said, get it away!”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll hurt his feelings. Now where was that wound? Oh, yes.” He tilted the ladle until the leech slowly oozed out and plopped onto her left breast.

“Get it off me! Get it off!”

“Don’t fuss so. Let it do its work.”

“Get it off!” Her voice screeched, panic rising. She squirmed as the slimy creature oozed its way across her. “Get-it-off!”

“Many hardy souls such as yourself are quite resilient when it comes to physical torment or fear, yet still have a weakness. Spiders, perhaps. Loud noises. But I suspected that you might have a touch of tactile defensiveness. We all do, of course, to varying degrees. But your case might be more extreme.” He smiled. “Oh, look. The little beastie has found the wound. Engaging suckers.”

“Please make it stop.” She was sobbing, her voice bubbling, tears streaking. “Please make it stop.”

“Just leave it to him. He knows what’s best for what ails you. Oh-look! Another wound.” With his fingertip, he traced a line up the inside of her upper thigh. “Fortunately, I have more of these salutary animalcules.”

“No! Not there!”

He plopped another leech onto her leg. Tiffany writhed and shivered, thrusting herself forward and backward, right and left, trying to shake it off, to no avail.

“Is that a pimple on your face? Oh, I hate those.”

“Please don’t. Please don’t.”

“Here comes another helper.”

“Not on my face! Please! Not on my-”

He dropped it just above her upper lip. It immediately began to slither toward her mouth.

Her eyes widened with fear and helplessness. She didn’t dare speak, but she bucked against the table, thrusting her hips, squirming, trying to relieve herself of the slimy creatures.

“Honestly, Tiffany, you will carry on, won’t you? About three puny leeches? The way you’re behaving, I might as well-you know what? I think I will.”

He tilted the bucket and dumped it, gray ooze and leeches alike, on top of her. Tiffany was deluged with the muck, in her eyes, in her mouth, every crevice and orifice.

She sputtered and spit, trying to keep it out of her mouth, but it was useless. She spat out a leech, gagging. She shuddered, unable to hold still. Her eyes were wide as balloons, her breathing a rapid-fire succession of jagged intakes, her chest heaving. She couldn’t speak, but was reduced to making incoherent guttural noises, vacant and horrifying.

“How does it feel?” he asked, truly curious. “Having that sucking sensation all over your body, on your hands, your face, even your most private parts? Is it too awful? Or is it, as you young girls say, a turn-on?”

“Please make it stop, please make it stop, please make it stop…”

“Oh, Tiffany, my dear, you don’t need me to do that. It will stop, sooner than you might imagine. You see, those leeches are more than just disgusting. They are poisonous. Instead of ridding your body of toxins, they are actually infecting you, tainting your bloodstream with a potent cyanide derivative.” He looked at her levelly. “You will be dead soon, Tiffany. And then you won’t be able to feel the little creatures at all.”

“Pleeeeeeeeeeeease!” At least, that’s what he thought she was saying, but her shrieks were so piercing at this point he couldn’t make it out with any degree of fidelity.

“Goodbye, Tiffany. I’ll let you spend your final moments in peace.” Even as she cried and pleaded with him, he laid down the bucket, wiped his hands on a towel, and left the room.

She screamed for more than an hour before it was over.

“Who the hell is the leak?” Patrick bellowed, slamming the front door behind him.

I looked up, as did virtually everyone in the building. Outside, I could see reporters’ faces jammed up against the glass like trick-or-treaters with their own perverse way of celebrating the forthcoming holiday. We were under siege. Had been all day.

Patrick stomped through the aisles, pushing aside locals and feds alike. I had never seen him in such a state. “It’s one thing to leak our theories. New developments. But we don’t even know for sure that Edgar took these girls!” He pounded his fists against the staircase banister. “For all we really know, they could be holed up at the Flamingo with their quarterback boyfriends!”

I knew what he was talking about. The morning papers had leaked the names of the three potential abductees-Tiffany and Judy and JJ. While cautiously reporting that the LVPD was investigating the possibility, they strongly suggested that it was a fact-that the girls were now dead and that it was all our fault.

“Is this tirade supposed to accomplish something?” I asked when he made it to my desk.

“Excuse me very much,” he spat back. “You may be used to this kind of amateurism, but at the Bureau, we don’t countenance leaks. They compromise the investigation!” He headed down the stairs. “I’m going to talk to our criminalists.”

Because those FBI guys are so much smarter than I am? Even though they don’t have the sense to take off their sunglasses when they come inside? Even though they dress like extras from Men in Black?

I gave the desk a shove, kicked back in my chair. I shouldn’t let it get to me. He was just frustrated, like everyone else connected to this case. But he doesn’t have to take it out on me. Especially after all I’ve been through. After all that we’ve… shared.

Damn. Amazing how much less sexy guys are when they’re acting like assholes.

Tiffany did not die. The leeches were infected with a mild paralytic, enough that she might well think she was dying (and did). But not nearly enough to kill her. He had planned it that way.

She had screamed and begged for mercy till her voice was shredded and her tears were dry and there was nothing she could do but wait to die. But she did not.

“Tiffany! Still with us? Lovely.” She was shivering, making quiet sobbing noises, her naked body covered with dried slime, leeches, and the remnants of leeches. They had sucked all over her body; her flesh was variegated with bruises and discoloration. Her eyes were cloudy and her expression was vacant, but he could see she was still there. Part of her, anyway.

“I’m sure you must be thinking horrible thoughts about me right now, thinking I’ve been terrible to you. If only you could understand that it is not so. Per contra, this has all been for your benefit.”

She shuddered, trembled, but did not attempt to answer.

“I know you’re probably not able to speak, so I won’t expect you to hold up your end of the conversation. I’ll do it for you. Look what I brought.”

He loosened the straps just enough that she could peer up and see what he had brought with him.

Two bizarre hairy orange costumes. Orangutans.

“I knew you were anxious to see your two friends, so I brought them with me. They’re quite agreeable these days. They put on their costumes without any hesitation. I hope you will, too.” He leaned closer. “I’m afraid I exaggerated a bit beforehand, my sweet. The leeches drugged you, but they didn’t poison you. This time.”

She stared at him, shivering, her eyes wide and lost, like a broken doll.

“No need to feel left out, my dear. I’ve got a costume for you, too.”

It was like the others, except that a huge section was cut out at the bosom, with a similar cutaway at the groin.

She trembled as she spoke. “If-if-if-if if if if if I put it on, will you get this… slime off of me?”

“My dear, you’ll be able to do it yourself. I’ll provide the soap and water. You can pass the day away in indulgent lavation.”

He unstrapped her. She took the suit like an automaton, barely thinking. He handed her a towel and she wiped herself off, wiped and wiped and wiped, leaving red abrasions and in some places bleeding. She picked the leeches away, crying as she did it, from her waist, her breasts, her pubis. Some left round sucking circles, others left blood oozing from her skin. But she did not scream or misbehave. She just sobbed quietly, desperately.

Then she took the suit. “Seems… wet.”

“Coated with paraffin wax. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Go on now. You must be anxious to get dressed.”

She pulled the suit over herself. Her breasts hung out through the opening at the upper torso, while the midriff cutaway exposed her genitalia.

She put it on without complaining.

“What you have to understand,” he said gently, almost paternally, “what it took me so long to grasp, is that it isn’t enough to simply make an offering. The offerings must be true participants. Willing.”

He took a book of matches from his pocket, struck one, then lit a small torch-a club with oily rags wrapped and secured at the top.

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it? That all this might have some wondrous purpose? But I can assure you that it does. One day, all humanity will give you its thanks. Your suffering will lead this troubled world to eternal bliss.”

He smiled genially, then passed her the torch. “Set your friends on fire, Tiffany.”

She looked at him, peering through the eye holes in the orangutan mask.

“Don’t worry. They won’t resist. They only exist to please me. Set them on fire.”

Her arm twitched.

“If you refuse, of course, I’ll have no choice but to put you back on the table. Perhaps it will be time to restart the pendulum. Instead of putting it across your chest, we’ll let it take off an arm. Or a leg.” His eyes narrowed. “Or perhaps I should bring out more leeches. Would you like that, Tiffany? Shall we bring them back?” He paused. “Or perhaps I should give one of your friends the opportunity I now offer you. Remember-you’re wearing a suit, too, highly flammable. Perhaps I should ask JJ if she will light your fire.”

Tiffany hesitated. Her arm moved indecisively.

“What shall it be, Tiffany? Them, or you?”

She took the torch.

“That’s a dear. Finish it up now.”

She did not cry or wail. It was almost as if sensation had fled from her, as if the idea of resistance was beyond imagining.

“Do it, Tiffany. Do it now.”

The wax caught fire immediately. She stepped back from the flame, dropping the torch. One suit caught the other and in only a few seconds both were consumed in a blistering inferno.

“They won’t suffer long. The suits will fuse to their skin and the smoke will choke them and they’ll die before they experience… too much of the burning.”

Tiffany crumpled to the floor, the orangutan suit bunched around her, her head buried beneath her hands. Her limbs were limp, as if all strength, indeed the bones themselves, had disappeared. He sensed that she wanted to cry, but no tears would come. There was almost no feeling at all, just a deadness, and a felt horror, not at him, but at herself.

Blessed be the prophet. The time was at hand.

31

The phone rang. Lisa.

“Calling to brighten my day with a report on last night’s lip-lock?”

“No. You wanna shack up together?”

I drew in my breath. “But Lisa-this is so sudden. We haven’t even kissed. And I know how important that is to you.”

“I’m serious, Suze. I’ve found a place. Fabulous. Big. Guy needs a housesitter. He’s going to be gone for years. We could have it for next to nothing.”

I sat up. Living in hotel rooms and barren apartments was getting way stale. “Sounds too good to be true.”

“I haven’t even told you the best part yet. It’s in L.A.”

Everything seemed to go into slow motion. I drew the receiver from my face and stared at it. I noticed I was breathing deeply.

“You mean… leave Vegas?”

“Well, it would be a hell of a long commute.”

“But-I’d lose my job.”

“Technically, you already did that, sweetie. And this consulting thing can’t last forever.”

“What would I do?”

“I don’t know. But you are a trained psychologist, remember? There are a lot of things you could do that don’t involve poking around corpses or getting nabbed by serial killers. Personally, I think it would do you good. To get away from all the… reminders.”

My eyes went into deep focus. There was a certain truth to what she said, of course. She wasn’t the first to suggest that I should leave. And if I won the custody hearing, I could take Rachel anywhere I wanted. Maybe I could go back into clinical work. Maybe get a cushy job as a corporate trainer.

I wondered if this house in L.A. had palm trees. I always wanted a house with palm trees.

“I don’t know, Lisa. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Okay. There’s no rush. Let’s talk tonight, okay, girlfriend?”

After she hung up, I had a hard time getting my head back where it belonged. Police work had been a part of my life for so long. It was the one thing my father and I’d had in common, and then after he was gone, something David and I had always shared. To some extent it had been my life, especially after David was gone. But what had it ever done for me? Made my life a misery. Gotten me kidnapped, abused. Reviled by my colleagues. Driven me to drink.

And there would always be room for another shrink in La-La Land, right?

I might still be thinking about it if Granger hadn’t burst into what I laughingly called my office. “Are you as sick and tired of these goddamn Feebs as I am?”

“Probably not,” I said honestly. “Why?”

“They’ve taken over the whole damn investigation!”

“And this surprises you? Granger-it’s what they do.”

“Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you or I could crack this case? Show up those Junior J. Edgars?”

“Yeah. Especially if it were me.”

Darcy shuffled in behind him. He’d been acting like the department errand boy all day, couriering things from one department to the other, delivering messages, even going for coffee. Anyone else his age might’ve found it demeaning, but Darcy wanted to be on the premises, even when he and I weren’t doing anything. And not an hour passed that he didn’t find some reason to come by my desk.

“Have you been thinking about that cheerleader one, Tiffany? ’Cause I’ve been thinking about that one.”

“Really? Why?”

“Did you know that when most children run away from home, they have some kind of place in mind where they’re going?”

I slowly rose out of my chair. “Are you saying you think Tiffany was running away from home?”

More shrugging. Staring at the carpet. “Not exactly.” His hands began to pump the air. “But I don’t think she’d leave unless she had someplace she wanted to go.”

He was giving me all the bread crumbs, but I wasn’t following the trail. “We’ve quizzed everyone. They say she had no friends or family around here.”

“She was interested in police work. She wanted to be a policeman.” His chin rose. “Lots of people wish they could be a policeman.”

“So what are you saying? Maybe she decided to visit headquarters?”

“Did you watch the news last night? ’Cause I watched the news last night. It was all about Edgar.”

“Yeah, it has been for-” Wait a minute. Praise God, I was starting to see the glue. “Tiffany would’ve known about the Edgar murders. And she was interested in police work.”

Granger jumped in. “So she might’ve decided to do a little investigating?”

“Come on, Granger, we see it all the time. Whenever a case gets a lot of attention. The rubberneckers turn out at the scene of the crime, at the courthouse, whatever. Some people thrive on this kind of stuff.”

“But where would she go? That shack out by the dam? That strip joint?”

I knew the answer before he’d finished speaking, knew it with a clarity that startled even myself. “Where the first body was found. Where Fara Spencer was killed. The Whitechapel of this whole case.” I paused. “The Transylvania. That’s where he grabbed them. Because that’s where he is.”

The girls were in their respective stalls, performing their nine-thirty poses.

They sat on the cold, bare floor in a confined area with nothing to do, nothing to look at, cold, dirty, naked. Every waking hour he would bring them a picture, usually something torn out of a porn magazine, always a woman in some demeaning pose. He would give them whatever they needed to re-create the scene. And then he would wait.

Not a word need be spoken. They knew what he wanted. And he rarely had to wait long to get it, certainly not after the first day. They knew what disobedience would bring. No food, for starters. No water. Not even a clean pan for their excrement. And quite possibly a return visit to the pendulum. Or the leeches. Or whatever else was required.

There had been no disobedience for a long time.

After they assumed the pose, whatever it was, he snapped their picture with his Polaroid, then posted it on the wall next to them. A little something to remind them who and what they were now. What they had become.

His. They belonged to the Raven, heart and mind and soul.

Judy and JJ had not been in those orangutan suits, of course, although it would’ve been magnificent, their ashes rising in an incandescent blaze, a magnificent incarnation of the prophet’s tale of little Hop-frog’s revenge. But the shock of thinking she had killed them-willingly-had been more than enough to break Tiffany. She had ended up even more deeply subservient than the two who had crumbled first. She was a sock puppet with his hand inside her.

Now the three of them were so compliant, so eager to please him, that a picture was not even necessary. As soon as he entered the room, Tiffany began to assume a variety of poses, running through her repertoire, reenacting the photos on the wall. Anything to please him.

Perfect.

Everything at the hotel was proceeding apace. The Poe room was gone, The Hunchback of Notre Dame tableau was all but complete. It was not one of the prophet’s works, but it would serve his purposes just the same.

All he lacked was the Vessel. Susan. Perhaps he had given her too much time, hoping that the time bomb he’d left ticking in her head would bring her to him of her own accord. One way or the other, once he had secured the Vessel, all his preparations would be complete.

Tiffany slithered up to him and wrapped herself around his feet. She pointed to her mouth, begging for food. Pathetic thing. He shook his head; he had not even brought a cube of sugar. Didn’t matter.

She pulled up his pant leg and began to lick his ankle, purring.

32

I ripped the information out of the printer just as quickly as it emerged. For once, even my inner Luddite was glad we lived in the computer age. Once I convinced the management of the Transylvania that we should be permitted access to their records-by giving them no choice whatsoever about it-getting what we wanted was a relative snap. Compiling a list of all the guests who had stayed at the Transylvania since the body of Helen Collier was found was a cinch. Then we winnowed it down to a shorter list of all male guests who fit the current profile. I started with the names of men who had been staying at the hotel for a while and were still on the premises. As soon as I had the names and addresses, I transmitted them by fax to headquarters, where Madeline and Patrick ran Internet and FBI checks on them. She could also tap the DMV records and see if they owned a pickup.

We’d been at it for hours, and so far, we didn’t have any suspects who fit all the parameters. But I wasn’t worried. Names were still flying out of the computer. I knew we were on to something. I felt it in my heart, my bones. We were on the right track, finally.

Most importantly, I felt good. Even though I had no right to, not yet. But I did. I felt strong. I felt sober. I hadn’t had a drink for days, and I was dealing with it. The shakiness was fading. I didn’t think about it all the time. I had something more important to occupy my brain.

“Still no match?” Granger asked. He pushed away from the computer terminal and stretched. He’d been at it for hours. Turned out he was pretty good with those evil little machines.

I didn’t look up. I was scanning names, faxing, periodically talking into my cell, and chatting with Granger, all at once. I don’t need a computer to multitask. “Not yet. But he’s in there somewhere. Give me some more names.”

“That’s going to take a while. We’ve covered Tower One, but they keep Tower Two in a separate database. It’ll take a while to load.”

“All right. No point in me standing around while you work.” I grabbed my coat. “I’m going to slip out for a minute. I’ll be back soon.”

“You’re leaving the hotel?”

“Right.”

“There are about a zillion bars out there.”

My buoyancy submerged, but only for a moment. “I’m going to visit my niece. I am not sneaking out to get a drink, Granger.”

“I know,” he said.

That caught me by surprise. He did?

“But-why make life difficult for yourself?”

“You want me to wear a chastity muzzle?”

He smirked. “You’re still a potential target. Take one of the uniforms with you. Take Berman.”

“I outweigh Berman by fifty pounds. How’s he going to stop me from doing anything?”

“He’s Church of Christ. He sees you order a drink, you’ll get a lecture so harsh it might save even your soul.”

Against my will, I found myself smiling. Why did Granger have to display these occasional flashes of human-beingness? It made it so much harder to hate him.

He’d been more than a bit worried when he saw Susan at the hotel. He had followed her discreetly, just to make sure she wasn’t getting too close. Happily, she never came near the ballroom. But after she left the hotel-

He had no idea what an astounding discovery he would make.

How had she managed to keep this from him so long? He had researched everything he could find about her. He’d hacked into her police file, searched the newspaper morgue, performed repeated Internet sweeps, quizzed her when she was barely conscious and unable to resist. But somehow, through it all, she had managed to withhold one detail.

There was another Pulaski. A little girl.

Just the age he liked them.

He’d run a computer search through the city database and come up with a name: Rachel Pulaski. A daughter? No. If she and her deceased husband had procreated, it would have appeared in the public records. Same for any adoption. A cousin?

A niece, as it turned out.

Her brother, the one who died in the traffic accident. That must be the answer.

But why was the girl living with strangers? Why wasn’t she with Susan? She must’ve lost custody, or been unable to obtain it. So she was reduced to occasional visitation.

A rapid-fire synaptic flurry crackled in his head. New ideas flooded to the surface. Was this why he’d been unable to break Susan, why she had not become his willing partner like Tiffany and her friends? His quest for Susan was always marred by the fact that she was not suited to be an offering, much less the Vessel.

But Rachel was. She so perfectly, delicately, wonderfully was.

His premonition had been right. The name Pulaski would be writ in the roll call of Dream-Land. But not Susan Pulaski. Rachel.

He must have her.

Originally, he’d been trying to reincarnate Virginia as she once was. Of course that was impossible; her flesh was dust. But like the prophet’s Ligeia, her spirit could be recaptured, brought back to the earthly plane. If only he had the proper Vessel.

He would have to remove her, to condition her, and he had little time. But he was sure it could be done. And then Virginia would return to him. And together, they would leave this horrid world behind. And create a far better one.

The only thing worse than Granger acting like a human being was Granger trying to be consoling.

“It’s not your fault, Susan. It was a good theory. I thought we were on to something, too. But even the best theories don’t pan out sometimes.”

“He’s here. I know he’s here.”

He actually laid a hand on my shoulder. And the worst of it was, I let him. “We went through all the records, Susan. Twice. And we didn’t come up with anything.”

I pressed my palms against my forehead, running every scrap of Edgar-data through my brain for the millionth time or so. “We must have something wrong. In the profile. The description. Something.”

“Susan, you’ve looked at everyone who has stayed here in the last month who even remotely fits your profile. You came up with zip.”

Truth hurts. He was right. I’d played my best hand and come up short. The review of the Transylvania’s guests had yielded nothing.

Where was all my buoyancy now? All that blinding self-confidence? The girl who was going to catch the bad guy and never drink again? Where had she gone? Now when I looked in the mirror, I just saw a big placard reading LOSER. LOSER-AND DRUNKARD.

My wrist throbbed.

Granger was shuffling papers, obviously making moves to get the hell out of this tiny hotel office. “You look beat. Why don’t you let me drive you home?”

So I won’t stop somewhere and drown my sorrows in alcohol? “Sure. Thanks. Darce?”

After he’d done everything he could back at headquarters, Darcy had joined us here at the hotel. I don’t know why. But I made sure he went over every name, every bio, every scrap of information I had, just in case I missed something. When your PC fails you, put a human computer on the case, right? He’d stared at those lists till his eyes watered.

“Did you know Einstein wrote his Special Paper on Relativity three times before he realized that space was curved? That was what made the whole thing make sense.”

I gave him a tired grin. “I’m much too feeble to grasp Einsteinian physics at the moment. Or any other moment, actually.”

“Can I go over the lists again?”

“No, Darcy,” I said, clapping him on the back. “We’re all going home now.”

The fax machine pinged.

“Did Madeline have anything else to send us?” I asked.

Granger shook his head. “Madeline has gone home.”

That was intriguing enough to keep me by the machine a few seconds longer. And halfway through the cover sheet, I had an even better reason.

“It’s from Edgar.”

How did he know we were here? I took the sheet and stared at it. Another coded message. But this time it was all ones and zeros.

“He’s really taken this multiple-substitution code gimmick to the outer limit.”

Darcy snatched it from me. “I think that this must be binary code. Do you think that this is binary code?”

“What, like computer talk?”

“Can I use this please?” He was already scooting in front of the hotel’s PC.

“Sure. Ain’t mine.”

He tapped information into a black screen on the computer, fingers flying faster than I could follow. It all looked like gibberish to me.

“Hey,” I said, “this probably won’t be important. He wants to brag, impress me, maybe scare us a little. But he won’t give us anything we can use to stop him. And I’m not going to stay up all night so I can read a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s grocery list.”

“I think that maybe this is a hyperlink,” Darcy said, not that it meant anything to me. “The code is much easier than the last one, if you know COBOL.”

“Well, that’s nice, but it could still take hours and-”

“Got it.” Darcy clicked the Enter button a few more times. A Web browser came up, and a few moments later I saw the hourglass symbol that told me it was traveling to a new destination.

“You think Edgar has his own Web site?” Granger asked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. There are plenty of public-access servers that allow anonymous uploads. But what would he post? Poe’s Greatest Hits? MP3s for the Golden Age? Photos of his vic-”

My tongue froze in my mouth. The graphic image in the Web browser had begun to resolve.

It was a photograph, presumably taken from a distance with a digital camera. I had no problem recognizing one of the people in the photo. It was me. Didn’t have to work much to identify the other person, either. The one I was talking to.

It was Rachel. He knew about Rachel.

“Oh, God,” I said as a cold sweat broke out all over my body. “Oh, my God.”

“I’m calling for backup,” Granger said, already dialing his cell. “What’s her address?”

“Oh, God,” I repeated uselessly. Rachel. All I had left-

“Susan! Give me her address!”

And I did. Pulling myself together as best I could, I grabbed my car keys and raced for the front door. Please, God, don’t let us be too late. Please, don’t let us be too late.

But my own words haunted me, even as I raced out the door and into the stifling desert night air.

He wouldn’t give us anything we could use to stop him.

Rachel raised the window and leaned out into the cool night air.

Not a creature was stirring, as the poem went. Excellent.

It was drizzling outside. The white trellis attached to the front of the house was slick. She would have to be careful.

She hoisted herself through the window, flipped her feet around, then slowly descended onto the trellis. The Shepherds were nice folks, but they had to be crazy not to see how easy it was to get out of this room. Just too innocent to consider the possibilities, she supposed. Or perhaps it was some sort of test.

Didn’t matter, she thought, as she dropped like Spider-Man down the side of the house. At first, she’d thought the Shepherds were pathetic, hilarious, ridiculous. But over time, she had sort of gotten used to the regularity of life with them. She had found new friends, new interests. It wasn’t all bad, really.

But her first loyalty was to Susan. Had to be. She was family. And she knew how much Susan loved her. Knew how much Susan counted on her, needed her if she was to stay sane. When she’d visited earlier today, Rachel could see how edgy she was. Then when she got the call from a co-worker telling her how much Susan had fallen apart, how desperate she was-Rachel knew she had to go to her.

She hadn’t packed much, but then, she didn’t have much to pack. She’d thrown some clothes in a backpack and scraped together all the money she had-less than twenty dollars. It would be enough. She’d catch a city bus to Susan’s neighborhood, then hike the rest of the way to her hotel room. Simple.

She checked carefully in all directions before she emerged from the concealing shadows of the house. No signs of life, not even a car in the distance. She made a break for the sidewalk.

Vegas buses ran all night long. She supposed they had to. Businesses were open all hours and people had to get to work. She crossed the first street, then another, then several more, moving much faster now, making her way toward the bus stop at the corner.

It was lighted; she wasn’t crazy about that. A safety precaution, she supposed, but tonight, she preferred to remain in the darkness. She was pretty sure the Shepherds hadn’t heard her leave, but you never knew.

She checked the posted schedule. Bus should be along in about five minutes. This time of night, of course, it was impossible to be sure. She decided to move a few feet down the street, out of the light, at least until she heard the chug-chug of the diesel engine or the high-pitched squeal of hydraulic brakes…

“Excuse me, miss. Rather late, isn’t it?”

She froze. Where the hell had he come from?

“Mind if I ask where you’re going?”

He was wearing a uniform. Wasn’t the usual uniform, though. She couldn’t read the name on his badge.

“I’m going to visit my aunt. You got a problem with that?”

“No. Do your parents know about this?”

“My parents are dead.”

The man gazed at her with an intense focus. She couldn’t recall ever being subjected to such severe scrutiny before. What was he looking for?

“I’m sorry to hear that, miss. Is your aunt your legal guardian?”

Rachel hesitated barely a second. “Yes, she is.”

“And does she know you’re out at this time of night?”

“Ye-es. It was… unavoidable. There was a mix-up at school and-”

The man’s eyes twinkled. “I think you’re lying to me, miss.”

“How would you know?”

“Come with me.”

She shrugged his hand away. “I’m not going anywhere except on a bus.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to insist. Consider yourself under arrest.”

“You can’t arrest me.”

“I can. Suspicion of delinquency.”

“Let me see your badge.”

“If you know what’s good for you-”

“I know not to get in a car with some weirdo just because he claims to be a cop.”

The man reached into his wallet and flashed something quickly. “Okay? Now, if you’ll just come along…”

She grabbed the wallet and reopened it. “This isn’t a LVPD badge.” She read the small print. “You’re just a private security cop. You can’t arrest me.”

His face seemed to transform, harden. His voice acquired an accent. “Don’t be difficult, Rachel, my dear. It’s for your own good.”

She took a step back. “How do you know my name?” Her eyes widened. “You’re him. You’re the guy. The one who grabbed Susan.”

“It would have been so much easier if you’d simply come when I asked.” He seized her arm, his grip so tight it hurt. She twisted back and forth, trying to break free.

“Give up,” he said, smiling. “You can’t get away.”

“Wanna bet, asshole?” She kicked him hard on the kneecap. He buckled. The next kick went into his groin. He released her arm.

Rachel turned to run, but before she could get away he wrapped an arm around her throat, pinching her trachea, yanking her down to the sidewalk. Rachel coughed and sputtered helplessly; she felt the air draining out of her lungs.

Still pinning her to the wet pavement with his left hand, he began fumbling for something in his jacket pocket with his right. Rachel saw her chance-probably her last one-and took it. She brought both fists around and pounded the arm that choked her, knocking it away. Before he could react, she slapped him on both sides of the head, right over his ears.

He screamed. His face contorted with pain and, even more, astonishment.

“You hurt me,” he murmured.

“About time someone did.” Rachel fled. Without looking back, she tore across the street and dove between two houses. Now she wouldn’t mind so much bumping into a cop, but what were the chances? She raced down the slick pavement, slipping and sliding, gliding down alleyways, creating shortcuts between houses and crisscrossing through residential streets. At least she knew the neighborhood. She had that advantage. Her sneakers slipped on a wet patch and she went flying feetfirst into a chain-link fence. She was dazed and her face was scratched, but she knew she couldn’t indulge herself in rest.

She checked over her shoulder, down the alleyway. Was he still there? She didn’t see him, but somewhere in the darkness, she thought she heard the footfalls of someone, someone running. She couldn’t keep this up. She’d never make it back to the Shepherds’ house on foot. She needed help.

She raced out into the street. Surely someone would come, even this time of night, anyone, it didn’t matter, just so she could get out of here before that guy caught up to her. Please!

In the distance, she saw the gleam of a pair of headlights. She shouted and waved, but it did not slow. What had Susan taught her? If you’re not sure someone will cooperate, don’t give them an alternative. She ran out in the center of the road, waving her arms wildly, forcing the oncoming vehicle to stop.

When it did, she ran to the passenger side. “I need a lift. Please! Someone’s chasing me. I think it’s that guy, the Poe freak.”

The young girl poised behind the wheel was about Rachel’s age. She seemed confused initially, but after a moment she said, “Get in.”

Rachel did. The second she closed the door, the truck peeled out. Rachel whipped around, peering out the back window, searching for a trace of the man who had been chasing her. Nice try, you sick pervert, she thought to herself. But you can’t have me.

“Where do you want to go?” the driver asked.

“Back to my-no, just take me to a gas station or something. Anything public that has a phone.”

“I think there’s one on the corner of Maple.”

“Great.” Rachel tried to relax. “I really appreciate this. You’ve saved my life, and I’m not exaggerating.”

“Glad I could help.”

“You and me both.” Rachel crumbled against the back of the cab. She was still breathing hard; her pulse was racing. But she was safe. “By the way, my name is Rachel.”

“I’m Tiffany.” All at once, the truck ground to a halt.

“Wait a minute. What are you doing?”

The girl did not respond. Her face was like a mask, expressionless. Her eyes were wide and hazy.

The passenger side door opened. Rachel screamed.

“We meet again.” It was him, the security guard. The killer. He was leaning into the cab. He held a hypodermic needle in his left hand.

“Help!’ Rachel tried to crawl out the other way, but the woman driving would not budge.

“You’ve done a good job, Tiffany,” the man said as he crawled after his prey. “You will be rewarded.”

“Leave me alone!” Rachel tried desperately to escape, but there was nowhere for her to go. She kicked and clawed at him, without avail. Behind her, the girl called Tiffany grabbed her arms and held her in place.

“So much spirit. Just like your aunt. And my Ginny. You are the perfect Vessel.”

Rachel tried to resist, but she was helpless, powerless, and even as she thought about somehow trying to get away, the needle jabbed her in the throat.

“Your devotion to your aunt is admirable. I was quite certain that phone call would bring you out.”

The instant the needle left her neck, Rachel felt her strength fading, the lights dimming.

“S-Susan…” she said as her eyelids fluttered closed.

“Susan can’t help you now, my sweet. You will not see her again.” He put the syringe back in his pocket, zipped it up, and gently slid his arms under her still, limp body. “But the happy thing is, after you’ve been with me for a while, you won’t want to.”

Two squad cars were already parked out front by the time Granger and I made the scene. Two uniforms were at the front door. I whipped the car around, tires squealing, parked in the middle of the street, and raced across the lawn.

They didn’t answer the doorbell, just as they hadn’t been answering the phone. I looked up and saw a window open. The window in what I knew was Rachel’s room.

I kicked the damn door open.

We raced inside, guns raised. Circling in formation, we flooded the downstairs, the living room, the kitchen. No signs of life, good or bad.

We found the Shepherds huddled upstairs in their bed. They’d thought it best not to open the door this time of night. They’d tried calling the police but couldn’t get a dial tone.

“Damn,” Granger said under his breath. “He must’ve cut the phone line.”

I bolted into Rachel’s room.

The breeze coming through the open window put a chill in the air. The lace drapes fluttered up and down. The room was silent.

She was gone. He had her.

33

Rachel woke screaming.

She was naked and strapped to a wooden chair in the middle of what looked like a basement. She couldn’t get free; she couldn’t move. She was barely able to squirm.

Only a few seconds later, he entered the room carrying a large oaken bucket.

“Where am I now?” she shouted. He’d repeated this pattern over and over again, ever since he abducted her, taking her to some new location, bringing her around for a few minutes, then drugging her again. She’d lost all sense of time and place.

“A little change of scenery while I finish my preparations. There’s so much to do. Did you like what I showed you earlier? Did it not seem a wondrous staging ground to ring in the Ascension? You’ll be returning later, after we’ve had a little fun.”

“Where are my clothes, you pervert?” Her voice was hoarse and strained. “Why did you take them?”

He smiled pleasantly. “I didn’t wish to get them wet.” And then he dumped the bucket on her.

It was filled with water, ice cold. It hit her like an arctic tidal wave. She thought she was going into shock; for a moment, it felt as if her heart actually stopped beating. She shivered uncontrollably, convulsing. She had never felt so bitterly frozen in her entire life.

“C-C-C-Could I please have a blanket? Or s-s-s-something. I-I-I-”

“I’m sorry. That isn’t an option.”

“B-B-B-But I’m s-s-s-so c-c-cold.”

“Yes. But fear not-later you’ll be hot. So terribly hot. Then cold again, then hot. Cold, hot, cold, hot. All the livelong day.”

She peered up at him, her eyes cloudy, her flesh a mottled pink covered with chill bumps, her arms clutched as tightly as possible to her exposed chest. “Why?”

“I should think that was obvious. To eliminate that trademark Pulaski stubbornness. Happily, I don’t require your total subservience. There simply isn’t enough time remaining. I already have my three offerings. You’re the Vessel. But fear not-it’s a most important role.”

She drank in air in deep, convulsive gasps. “Why… are… you… like this?”

He looked at her for a long moment. “A curious question. Why are any of us the way we are? There’s no satisfactory explanation, is there? Would you like me to tell you a sad story? Blame it all on my tragic childhood? Mommy didn’t love me. Daddy hit me with a hairbrush. Simplistic balderdash. We are what we are.” He adjusted the lay of his vest. “I am the Raven. Everything else was mere prologue.”

People were talking to me, shouting in my ear, demanding answers to their endless questions. I couldn’t process it all, couldn’t deal with it. Why had he targeted Rachel? How had I known he was coming here? Why hadn’t I done something about it sooner? Each time I started to give a coherent answer something else interrupted, a new demand, a false hope, a neural spasm in my brain. This could not be happening. This could not be happening.

Rachel!

“Everybody out of the house!” Patrick shouted. And when had he shown up? At least someone had the sense to preserve what was now a crime scene. God knows I hadn’t.

“Call the techs. Get Crenshaw. Get O’Bannon!”

Patrick barked out orders with impressive efficiency and organization. It should be me, I heard the voice inside my head say. It should be me.

Rachel!

All at once, every single living memory, every photograph, every reminder of what that man had done to me flashed through my head.

And now he had my niece.

Patrick pulled the questioners off me. I knew the respite would be a brief one, but I was determined to make the most of it. I found a sofa and sat, steadying myself. My hands were shaking again. My stomach was sick, tossing, craving. I knew what I wanted, what I needed. I felt it with an urgency I had not experienced before, not since I woke up by the dam, not even when I saw the pictures.

He had won, he and the bottle. I knew I would get drunk tonight. I knew I would get drunk and stay drunk and be a drunk for the rest of my life. I had tried so hard. But I wasn’t strong enough.

I felt a sharp aching in my left wrist. God, I’d almost forgotten that was there. If only I’d done it right. I might be gone, but Rachel would be safe.

This was my fault. This was all my fault.

Next thing I remembered was Patrick sitting beside me, Darcy hovering behind him. Patrick was careful to keep his face sympathetic but calm, strong. And Darcy was expressionless. Was that because he wasn’t picking up on the nonverbal clues, didn’t comprehend my fear and sadness? No, I think he got it, perhaps more than anyone. He just didn’t know what to do about it. Who could?

“We have to ask you some more questions, Susan. Not just about what happened tonight, but about Rachel in general. Anything you can tell us about her that might be helpful.”

I felt so useless. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even raise my eyes to his.

“But I don’t know why it has to be done here,” Patrick continued. “Best if we take it back to headquarters.”

So I won’t be around if the crime techs start making discoveries? Like Rachel’s blood? Evidence of her death or torture?

“Why don’t you ride back with me? I’ll get a sergeant to bring your car-”

“No, I’ll drive,” I said, snapping out of it with a suddenness that startled both of us.

“I don’t think that’s wise.”

“I can do it. I’ll meet you back-”

He grabbed my wrist and held it tight. “We need you on this, Susan. We need you one hundred percent.”

I knew what he was saying. He knew why I wanted to drive myself. But it was all so far beyond my control.

O’Bannon crouched down beside me. “Susan, I’m sorry to have to do this to you, but you’re off the case.”

“What?”

“Your niece is a victim now. You’re too close. I could overlook your own involvement, but not hers. Effective now, your consulting contract is canceled. You can keep the desk. I’ll try to assign you something else when an appropriate case comes along. But as for now-”

That was when the phone rang, cutting him mercifully short. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. But I was sitting right next to it. So I picked it up.

No. I have to be honest. I knew who it was. And I knew it was for me.

“Yeah.”

“I have her.”

“Son of a bitch.” I clenched the receiver so tightly my fingers turned white. “Why Rachel?”

“I needed her. She’s the Vessel.”

“You said you cared about me, you bastard!” I shouted, feigning a toughness I did not feel. “If you do anything to her, anything like what you did to me-”

“Please calm yourself, dear. This is pointless.”

“I’ll make your god Poe look like an unimaginative grandma when you see what I can do. Have you hurt her?”

“Of course not.”

“What is it you want?” I cried. “What is it you want from me?”

“Now? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Then why-”

“I just called to tell you that you needn’t worry. I have Rachel, and I will take good care of her, after my fashion. There’s no chance that you’ll catch me or recover her. So relax and enjoy what little time is left.”

My head felt thick and unresponsive. There must be something I should do, something I should say. But what was it? “What do you mean, what little time is left?”

“I’ve told you before, Susan. The end times are upon us. I have everything I need now. Everything.”

“Let me talk to her. If you really haven’t hurt her, let me talk to her.”

A long sigh. Followed by: “Five seconds.”

The phone passed. “Oh, my God, Susan, it’s him. It’s really him. I haven’t been this scared since that day when we rented a video just after my parents-”

“Time’s up.”

“Bastard!” I wailed, my voice hoarse. “You could at least let her finish the sentence.”

“I’m afraid we must go, just in case you’re tracing.”

“Can I talk to her again tomorrow?”

“I… doubt she’ll be… able to communicate clearly.” I heard him sigh. “I wanted so much to save you, Susan. But I couldn’t do it. And who else is going to try?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think you know. Good night, Susan. Try not to make a mess of it this time.”

The line disconnected.

While they were all babbling about the trace and the recording and what it meant, I stumbled to my car and drove away, fast, before Patrick got up the strength or numbers to stop me. My heart was pounding and my brain was racing. A thousand thoughts cruised through my head at once. It was like being drunk without being drunk. Was this what they called a dry drunk? I couldn’t focus. Couldn’t get a grip on myself, on anything.

Except one thing. I knew where I was going. Gordy’s. Back where this all began. It was appropriate, no? Symmetrical.

Had I ever really thought for a minute I could give up drinking? Who was delusional now? The bartender would still serve me, I thought, and if he didn’t, there was a liquor store next door. Hell, that might be quicker. What did it matter? No shortage of places to get drunk in Vegas.

Soon as I got there, I parked, popped open the car door, put one leg out-and froze.

Not voluntarily. I wanted to move. I kept telling myself to move. It was as if I’d lost all control, as if some alien being had taken over my body.

I closed my eyes and saw Darcy-Darcy, of all people-in my mind’s eye. The autistic savant, the boy who didn’t comprehend emotion, but who nonetheless had given me so much emotional support. He was just staring at me. He liked me, I’d have to be blind not to see that, but he wasn’t happy to see me. He was sad. So sad.

Rachel wasn’t sad. Worried, not sad. I saw almost everyone I knew, Lisa, Patrick, Granger, the chief, my parents, my suspects, all of them, all of them, all of them.

David.

They were so sad.

That’s what he wants you to do.

I somehow managed to get my leg back inside the car and close the door, but that was such a strain that I decided to forget about trying to move again for a while.

Try not to make a mess of it this time.

My wrist throbbed. Throbbed, like an aching in the hollow of my heart.

“Don’t let him win, sugar bear.”

“It’s so… hard,” I said, even though I knew I wasn’t speaking.

“Naturally,” David replied, with his understanding smile. “It’s meant to be.”

“I wish you hadn’t done it, David. I wish you hadn’t.” I folded over on the seat, hands tucked into my lap, cradling like a fetus. “I just wished you’d loved me enough to stay.”

David looked at me with heavy eyes. “I’m sorry, Susan. It’s hard to admit, but-there are times when love has nothing to do with it.”

I lay on the seat like a pathetic baby, which is exactly what I was. “I don’t forgive you, David. Not now, not ever. I will not forgive you.”

His eyes only deepened. “This is my last visit, Susan.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you need to get on with it. And you won’t, as long as I’m around.”

And then he was gone. And I lay across the front seat of my beat-up car, crying into the vinyl, hurting, hurting so much.

But I was still inside the car.

34

When I woke up, I didn’t know how much time had passed. Somehow, all the smoke and cobwebs that once had fogged my brain had cleared, like someone had gone in with a mini-vac and sucked it clean. The aching, the craving, was still there. But it was manageable. I could make it. I knew that I could make it.

Rachel needs you, the voice in my head insisted. You have no more time to waste.

And yet I didn’t immediately start the car. I sat up straight and stared into the mirror. All I could see were my eyes, but somehow, that was enough.

I could catch this man, I told myself, looking right into those red, tired, mismatched eyes. I had the means, the gift. If only I could put it all together…

I tried to let my mind drift, free-associate. I thought if I opened things up enough, I might spark a connection, discover whatever it was I knew but my conscious mind had not yet seen.

Relax, I told myself. Breathe in, hold it, release. Breathe in, hold it, release.

I had been so sure I had him, back at the Transylvania. I could almost feel him in my grasp. But I’d come up short.

Pull back, Susan. Let your mind wander…

Had the three cheerleaders come to the Transylvania? Had the others?

Helen is a good girl. She would never do something like that…

Annabel was brilliant, an honor student even at MIT. I made sure she knew how to apply herself, how to turn heads…

The most important facet of the narcissistic personality is the absolute certainty of his own superiority, that he’s right and everyone else is wrong…

He’s smart, phenomenally smart. Deranged, but smart…

She made scrapbooks, just like I did as a girl. She even posted some of her art on her personal Web page…

My eyes opened.

Uniforms.

That was the key, damn it. Uniforms.

What did Helen have on the walls in her bedroom? What did she have pasted into her scrapbook, on her Web page? Not rock stars. Not TV hunks. Cops, firemen, doctors, pilots…

And what did they have in common? Uniforms. Where did she sneak out to in her black leather bad-girl getup? A biker bar? The teen stud club? No. The Army grunt hangout. Because that’s where she would find men in uniforms.

Helen had a thing for uniforms. She liked them.

She trusted them.

Tiffany admired policemen, firemen. She dreamed of one day being a cop herself, because she admired them so.

She trusted them.

There’s more, I heard a voice within me saying. Keep working it, keep digging…

Darcy had shown me the burn mark where the door had been forced, the door to the ballroom where Helen Collier was found. But why was that significant?

Because it pointed away from the room, not toward it. Because the chain had been torched from the inside.

Edgar had already been inside when he brought out his acetylene torch. He’d had access to the room. Breaking the chains andforcing the lock had been just another clever trick to throw us off his trail.

My respiration spiked. I was breathing hard and heavy, my heartbeat racing. I was getting there. I knew I was getting there.

I stormed into headquarters, taking them all by surprise. The feds appeared to be reorganizing our offices into an FBI hostage crisis center. Which wasn’t a bad idea, in theory. But I knew that by the time they were finished, it would be too late for Rachel.

Patrick was in the chief’s office, conferencing. Darcy sat silently behind O’Bannon’s desk.

“Susan!” O’Bannon bellowed. “Where the hell have you been?” He looked at me suspiciously.

“Go ahead, sniff my breath. I haven’t been drinking.”

“Then what? Damn it-this is your own niece.”

“I know that,” I said firmly. “I also know he won’t kill her. Not yet. He might… do things to her. But she’s strong. She’ll survive. I did.”

“Susan, our investigators have a thousand questions-”

“And I’ll answer them. But in exchange, I want five plainclothes answering to me and complete freedom.”

They stared at me, all of them, speechless.

“And I’d like Patrick, if the Feebs can spare him. And Darcy,” I added. “Most importantly, Darcy.”

O’Bannon stared at me uncomprehendingly. “Have you taken complete leave of your senses?”

“Just the opposite. Regained them, finally.”

He looked as if he were about to burst a blood vessel. “Even given the bizarre assumption that I said yes, what do you think you’d do?”

“Go back to the Transylvania.”

“You already played that hunch! It was a good theory. But it didn’t pan out. None of the guests-”

“He isn’t a guest. He works there.”

Patrick stepped forward. “Susan, I looked at the employee rolls. I didn’t see anyone who-”

“Then we need to line them up and let me look. I’ll recognize the rat bastard.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. It’s obvious, once you know.”

“Know what? What do you think he does?”

“I’m not sure. But I know he wears a uniform.” I paused. “I think there’s a good chance he’s a cop.”

He frowned. “A cop?”

“Or something like a cop. Don’t they have security at the Transylvania? I thought I remembered seeing some.”

“Of course they do. But they might contract the security out, like most of the big houses.” He snapped his fingers. “Which would explain why he didn’t turn up on the employee rolls.”

“I need to get over there immediately.” I turned to O’Bannon and looked him square in the eyes. “With your permission.”

He barely hesitated a second. “Consider yourself back on the case.”

“Good. I’ll stay in touch.”

“You won’t have to. I’m coming with you.” He pulled out his desk drawer and tossed something onto his desk. A gun. My gun. “I think you may need this.”

“I don’t know. If you’re not-”

He pressed it into my hand. “I insist.”

“We need to blanket the hotel,” Patrick said. “Make sure he doesn’t slip out before we identify him. How much time do we have till this Day of Ascension?”

I checked my watch. “Only a few hours.”

“Hours? Then the Day of Ascension-”

“When else?” I led the way to the door. “Today. Halloween. At the witching hour.”

35

“You think this place will be ready in time, Ernie?” Martin asked.

He was calm and confident. “I don’t see why not. The grand opening isn’t until midnight.”

“But there’s so much still to do.” Both pairs of eyes scanned the ballroom. The façade of the Notre Dame cathedral was largely in place, but some of the surrounding decorations were in pieces on the floor, waiting to be assembled. Exposed scaffolding occupied a corner of the room. “I hear the hunchback is still experimenting with his makeup. And what’s with these bells?” He gestured toward the huge six-foot bells that were being hoisted into place at the front of the cathedral. “Those mothers are huge. And heavy. Why would the hotel lay out so much for bells?”

“You can’t do The Hunchback of Notre Dame without bells.”

“Hey, I been meaning to ask-what were you doing in the ventilation shafts last night?”

He stiffened. “Last night?”

“Yeah. I saw you crawling out of that shaft over at the north end of the casino. I didn’t even know that was big enough to get into. What were you up to?”

“One of the patrons reported smelling smoke. I didn’t detect it myself, but I thought it best to be certain.”

“Huh. Well, they never covered that when I came on. Maybe you can show me how to get in there later tonight.”

He touched the syringe in his pocket. He could take this man out if necessary. Quickly and quietly. “Tonight would not be a good day, what with all the work going on. Perhaps after the Halloween celebration.”

“Good point. Okay.”

His hand relaxed. Just as well. Another dead security officer would draw more attention to the hotel-and he had directed too much attention here already. “If you’ll excuse me, I, uh, need to check on something in the storeroom.”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time in there lately.” Martin chuckled. “You got a naked girl up there?”

He smiled. “Yeah. Four of them.”

He left the ballroom and headed for the elevator bank. There was still much to be done, so many arrangements to finalize. Everything had to be right, just perfect. But soon he would be able to cordon off the ballroom so he could finish his preparations. Rachel would not participate willingly, but the other three would, and they would help him with her. He had put so much time and effort into this, not just with the offerings, but everything. Obtaining the C4 on the Vegas black market. His unbroken brown study of radio signals and electronics and incendiary agents. Everything that was required.

The hotel had spent thousands advertising this event, generating publicity for the grand reopening of this ballroom. But they would be celebrating ever so much more than those dullards imagined.

This celebration would be a cataclysmic event. An apocalypse for some, an ascension for others. The end of days.

“No, it can’t wait until tomorrow!”

I pounded my fists together for emphasis. I wasn’t trying to threaten the man-well, actually, I was, wasn’t I? If I couldn’t convince him of the urgency of the situation one way, I was prepared to try another.

“But today is a very special day,” Bloomfeld insisted.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“All our resources are taxed to the limit.” This guy had annoyed me when I was investigating the first crime scene and he hadn’t grown on me any in the interim. He was probably perfect for micromanaging the organizational details of a hotel but he was useless to me. “Our hotel is booked to capacity. Our Halloween celebration is generally considered the best anywhere. Thousands of people come to the Transylvania from all over the world.”

Patrick stepped between us. “I don’t give a damn about your tourists getting their ghost and ghoul fix. Four girls have been kidnapped.”

“My staff is already being pulled six ways at once,” Bloomfeld continued.

I shot him the harshest look I could muster. “I’m chasing a serial killer here, a killer who-unless he’s stopped-is going to try something very bad tonight, probably at midnight, which is less than three hours away. I think that’s a little-”

This was where Bloomfeld did his best to pretend he had a backbone. “I have a responsibility to my guests. They expect a party that-”

“I’ll cancel the damn party if you don’t cooperate with me! I’ll shut the whole hotel down.”

He froze, his face more horrific than any of their gargoyles. “You can’t do that.”

“I can and I will. I won’t let another girl die because you were too busy entertaining to help. Now you can deal with me, and we can go through your security contractor’s employment records, or I can shut the whole joint down. What’s it going to be?”

As if he had a choice. I held all the cards. And I had to admit-it felt good to be effective again, to be back on top of my game. Or getting that way.

Bloomfeld started gathering the records.

“Great technique,” Patrick said quietly. “Where’d you study, Nazi Germany?”

I suppose I should’ve been more respectful to Bloomfeld, since we were in his office in his hotel. Well, next week, I’d send him a Hallmark. Right now, I had a job to do. And some lives to save.

By eleven P.M., I had winnowed it down to five names. Five possibles who fit most of the criteria. The women were eliminated, of course. All the men of the wrong age group. Everyone who was physically too large to be Edgar. I classified them by economic group, by educational background, by family relationships. Anyone who listed a parent as a Person To Contact in an Emergency was eliminated. And in the end, I had five names.

One of them was Edgar. I was certain of it. But which one?

I peered at the pictures, the files, everything that was known about them. Darcy hunched over my shoulder. I had seen this man, damn it. I had talked to him. I should be able to pick him out of a photo lineup. Shouldn’t I?

Three of them were private security, where we had focused this search, but I was also considering a part-time tennis instructor and an actor who worked in the evening Spookapalooza show playing Edgar Allan Poe. I phoned Madeline and told her to run Net checks on all of them-to learn as much as she could as quickly as possible. I instructed Bloomfeld to round up all the suspects. And I let my mind do what it did best. From here on out, I knew finding Edgar would not be a matter of logic or analysis. Intuition had to take over. My instincts had to tell me which of these men kidnapped Rachel. And how to get her back.

The more I dwelt on it, the more I gravitated toward the three security officers. The tennis dude wore a uniform of sorts, but was it a uniform that instilled trust? Would Annabel, the MIT student, have given him the time of day? Judging from his photograph, he was a cute guy, not much older than she was. But somehow, I just didn’t believe it.

The actor who played Poe was an obvious choice-too obvious. If his Poe connection were that apparent, would he have given us the Poe-derived clues, the quotations, the literary death methods? I had seen this guy on television once or twice since the Poe connection was leaked, being interviewed as a local expert on “the Dark Bard of Baltimore.” No, he was way too high-profile. I didn’t buy it.

And then there were three. Damon William Cantrell. Jeffrey Henry DeMouy. Ernest Lee Abbott.

“What do you think, Darcy?”

Darcy stared at the pictures. His brain was in motion, I could tell that. But this wasn’t what he did best, was it? When he met them, he might notice the telltale smell of perfume or the stain of a certain kind of ash found only in Sumatra or whatever. But what could he do with a photo?

“I don’t think I like this one,” Darcy said. He pointed to the file photo of Cantrell, but I noticed he wasn’t actually looking at it. “His hair is like John Wayne Gacy’s hair.”

“Anything else?”

“Did you know that John Wayne Gacy is considered the most successful American serial killer? He made even more deaths than Ted Bundy.”

“Anything else?”

He tapped another picture, the one of Abbott. “I think that maybe I have seen him before.”

“Really? Where? In the hotel?”

His face twisted up. “I don’t remember,” he said-words I never expected to hear coming out of that mouth. But such was the irony of being autistic. He could remember chapter and verse about anything he read. But he was useless with faces. Some researchers thought autistic people didn’t really even see faces, their expressions and distinctions. Just a pink blur. Which would explain why they were so poor at picking up on visual clues, facial expressions, and body language.

Darcy was not going to pick the lucky winner.

“Where is Patrick, anyway?” I said. I wanted to get his opinion on this, before Bloomfeld arrived with the suspects. “He should be back by now.”

“I’ll go look,” Darcy said. He probably realized he wasn’t much help here. So he would be of use another way.

And I continued to stare at the pictures. Will the real Edgar please stand up?

I have to find Patrick Susan wants me to find Patrick and she’s so worried and scared about her niece Rachel who seems nice but I hope she doesn’t like Rachel more than me or she can like us both and is Rachel like her baby because I want her to have real babies and maybe she won’t maybe she won’t if something happens to Rachel like Mommy never had any more babies after me and Dad tells people that they couldn’t but they could I know they could Mommy told me they could but they weren’t going to because I was a difficult boy and they didn’t want any more difficult boys. We have to stop the Bad Man because he hurt those girls and he hurt Susan and he might try to hurt more people and it’s not right to hurt people. I would never hurt anyone. Hurting is bad.

I can’t find Patrick there are so many people in this gambling room and so much smoke I hate smoke I don’t know why people smoke it’s bad for you and it’s disgusting and it should be illegal it makes my eyes hurt so I went into the ballroom with all the weird decorations. I couldn’t see Patrick but I saw this guard guy and he was in a big hurry and I don’t know why I even looked at him except he was carrying an axe and that seemed weird and then I looked at him some more and I wasn’t sure if I knew him I never know if I know people but he smelled like someone I knew his smell was familiar and then he said something and I heard his voice and I remembered the guy on the street and all that talk about how tall he wasn’t except then he had a mustache and a different color hair and glasses and he looked different but he said something again and I knew it was him.

He must be the Bad Man.

He recognized me too and I made a joke about did he have any more good puzzles I could solve and he didn’t and I could see he was going to hit me just like the kids at school used to hit me and I should’ve done something about it. I should’ve stopped him but then I would have to hit him and it isn’t right to hit people it isn’t right and I don’t want to hurt anyone and I didn’t do anything and then he took the other end of the axe and he hit me and I fell down and then there was nothing.

“Please,” Rachel gasped. “I can’t stand it anymore. It hurts.”

“Only for a little while, my dear. Soon it will all be over.”

She’d been hanging upside down for far too long. Blood rushed to her head, making it throb so intensely she could barely think. “Where’s Tiffany? And the others. Where did they go?”

“They’re such dear girls, so eager to please. Nothing I ask is too much.”

“Because you’ve tortured and brainwashed them.”

“Rachel!” He tightened the ropes around her wrists and ankles, making sure she was secure. “Don’t speak like that. I’ve told you what is at stake. I’ve explained to you about the Ascension, about Dream-Land. About my sweet Virginia. The whole majestic plan.”

“I don’t want any part of your plan!”

He took her chin-upside down before him-and held it in his palm. “Would you prefer to be like the other heathens, those who remain on this plane and melt into nothingness? Or would you be translated into a Golden Age?”

“I would rather be at home in clean clothes.”

“Don’t be petty. Why can’t you see what I can see?”

“Because I’m not insane.”

He clamped the chloroform-soaked cloth over her nose and mouth, his hands shaking with rage. She was unworthy, but that spirit would soon be gone, replaced with that of his lost Virginia, and once he and she were reunited, nothing else would matter.

I was practically out of my mind when I finally heard the doorknob click. It was barely half an hour before midnight. Did they not understand? Midnight was the dreamtime, according to Poe. Later would be too late. Especially for Rachel.

Bloomfeld had two men trailing behind him whom I immediately recognized from their file photos. Two suspects. Two Edgar possibles.

But only two.

“Apologies,” Bloomfeld said. He could be quite polite, once you put the fear of death into him. “Couldn’t find the third officer.”

“We need him,” I said.

“We’ll find him in time, I’m sure. He’s supposed to be working in the ballroom, but no one could locate him. It’s already packed in there-hundreds of Halloween revelers. Ran into your partner, though, that FBI man. Sent him into the crowd to find the guy while I brought you these two.”

I stared at the photo of the missing security guard, Ernest Lee Abbott. I mentally added a mustache, changed the hair, put dark glasses on him.

“He’s normally very reliable. That’s why we asked him to help with the crowd control. Everyone is doing the work of three.”

I could imagine the man’s lips moving, his face. His eyes taking that somewhat menacing, somewhat sorrowful expression that told so much about him.

“If you want, I’ll go back to the ballroom and look some more. He’s probably behind the cathedral, helping with some last-minute crisis. Whose idea was it to do the Hunchback, anyway? I always thought it was too literary. Kids today, they don’t know anything about French literature. They probably think-”

“Hunchback?” I closed my eyes and let my mind wander again, but this time, it went straight to the source. The key clue. The one that hadn’t fallen into place before.

I haven’t been this scared since the day we rented a video just after my parents- That was what Rachel had said, during that brief phone call. Everyone thought she was terrified, babbling, me included. But we were wrong. Rachel is a tough girl, a smart one.

She was trying to give me a clue.

What was the movie? What was the damn movie?

Of course.

We’d rented The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Disney version. The first day I brought her home. After her parents were killed.

“Take me to this ballroom,” I said, rising out of my chair. “Now.”

Bloomfeld stuttered, “B-B-But I rounded up your suspects-don’t you want to interrogate them?”

I shook my head. “It’s the other one. Abbott. He’s Edgar.”

By the time I made it to the ballroom, I still hadn’t found Patrick, Darcy hadn’t returned, and it was barely ten minutes until midnight. Ten minutes.

Rachel! I wanted to scream out her name, but I knew that wouldn’t help, not in this earsplitting chaos. Please, God, don’t let me be too late. Don’t let me be too late.

Even though the Halloween party had not officially started, the ballroom was packed. I could see where Bloomfeld might’ve had difficulty finding one security cop in this swarm. I might have trouble finding myself in here. At least half the partygoers were in costume, many of them masked. If Edgar was one of them, how would I ever find him?

Think, Susan. Think!

He wouldn’t be out here mingling, would he? He has some tremendous master plan in the works, something wonderful, something terrible. Something involving Rachel. He couldn’t have her out here, whether she was costumed, dead or alive. Could he?

While I was trying to crawl into Edgar’s brain, I saw Chief O’Bannon enter the ballroom. I showed him the photo of Abbott.

“You’re sure it’s him?”

“Damn straight.”

He smiled a little. “Good girl. Knew you could do it.”

He took the left side of the room and I surged into the right. I saw the great façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame at the far end of the ballroom, a focal point for all the festivities. I moved toward it. I’ve never been to Paris, but it looked pretty damn real to me, except that it wasn’t quite finished. There was still some scaffolding, several raised platforms on wheels, off to the side. The ballroom was festooned with confetti and orange and black ribbons and banners. And where was the hunchback? He would emerge later, I guessed, probably from the top of the cathedral, ringing those four huge bells, two on each side of the central spire.

I moved toward the cathedral. It seemed like the place Edgar-Abbott-was most likely to be. And I knew Rachel had seen it before, right? That was the whole point of the clue.

Someone dressed in a jester costume fell into me, tumbling backward. I went for my gun. Jesus, was I on edge. I shoved him out of the way and tried to plow a trail through the dense horde. They were getting increasingly crazed, ebullient, nutty, which I suppose was to be expected as the clock approached midnight. I could smell alcohol breath every which way I turned. It made me sick.

Which was certainly a good sign.

Eventually I forced my way to the back of the room. It was a high-quality cathedral, made of some kind of molded fiberglass, stained to the proper shade of gray. Someone had spent some real money on this. After trying several false apertures, I found a door on the far side that worked.

I stepped into the cathedral, such as it was. It was dark back here, darker than I liked. The cathedral touched the ceiling and, despite the openings for the bells, little light crept through.

This was his place. I knew it, as sure as I’d ever known anything in my life. I could feel it.

I drew my weapon. I’d let IA argue later about whether I had cause or not. Right now, I wanted a gun between me and him.

I stepped into the darkness, marking a path I thought was parallel to the front of the cathedral. The entire area was small, close, silent. And dark. Did I mention that it was dark?

I took baby steps, inching forward, fighting the desire to rush ahead. I wanted to find Rachel. I had to find her before it was too late. But Edgar had proven how dangerous he could be, how smart. I had to be careful. I couldn’t save her if I were dead.

I kept moving forward, one dark step at a time.

Till I saw someone.

At first, I couldn’t make out who it was. His face was masked by shadows. He was sitting on the floor, looking up at me.

“Patrick!”

He was staring with a strange, vacant expression on his face. I holstered my gun and ran toward him. “Patrick!” I said, grabbing his arm. “Patrick! What are you-”

I gasped.

His head fell forward into my lap. Just his head.

I screamed like a siren, like a child at a horror movie, like the weakest sister who ever lived. Blood spilled all over my turtleneck, my pants. The head fell to the floor but didn’t roll. It just impacted with a sickening splat and lay there, staring up at me. It had been sliced clean-by a pendulum? I wondered-at the base of the neck.

My God, my God, Abbott killed Patrick, he killed him, and if he killed Patrick-

An even deeper horror clutched at the base of my spine.

It was so unlike him to be gone so long…

“Darcy!” I turned and ran back the way I came, feeling stupid, feeling powerless, terrified. He’d gotten to Patrick, he’d gotten to Patrick but please not Darcy please please please not Darcy…

That was when the bells began to ring. Did that mean it was midnight? Even with all the noise out front, the ringing of the huge bells was deafening. I was just beneath them, and the unrelenting clanging seemed to crush my skull. It was oppressive and mind-numbing. Why would the hotel want to-

I looked up.

My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe. My fingers were cold, as if all the life had been sucked out of me.

Rachel!

Because the apertures were recessed, it wouldn’t be visible from out front, but back here I had a clear view of four young girls strung up one to a bell, tied to the clappers, dangling head-down. Swinging back and forth. Their heads smashing against the sides of the bells.

“Rachel!” I shouted, even though I knew she couldn’t possibly hear me. Even if she were alive. If the sound was killing me down here, what must it be doing to them?

“Rachel!”

I forced my brain to calm, slow down-think! There must be something I could do. The bells had to be activated by some sort of mechanism. I needed to find the controls. Maybe I could ask someone. If not, I could climb up on that scaffolding out front…

I raced toward the door. And I had almost made it when a hand burst out of the darkness. It grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall. Before I could react, his other hand took my gun.

“Hello, Susan,” Edgar said, smiling. “Good to see you again.”

36

“Aren’t they magnificent?” His eyes rolled up in his head, even as his hand remained tight around my throat. “ ‘The throbbing of the bells! Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells!’ ”

I tried to speak but couldn’t. His grip was too tight.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed my little tableau. Your friend Patrick tried to spoil it, you know. But I couldn’t allow that. Not when I’m so close.”

He loosened his viselike fingers just enough that I could speak. “Why did you have to kill him?”

“I’m afraid I lacked the time for a more subtle response.”

“Those bells are killing Rachel. And the other girls.”

“Not killing. Translating.”

“Have you hurt her?”

“I haven’t put a mark on her.”

“I said, have you hurt her?”

“Not as much as you have.”

I thought I was going to explode. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Nothing you don’t already know. You’ve damaged that poor girl with your drinking, your temper, your self-indulgent weltschmerz, your flights of martyrdom. She’s felt alone in the world, unwanted. Forgotten by the only family she has.”

“Let me take her down.” The anger had left my voice. I was begging. “Let me save her before it’s too late.”

“You won’t be able to get to her.”

“And why the hell not?”

He removed a small radio transmitter from his jacket pocket and pushed the first button on the keypad. “Because the hotel is on fire.”

The building exploded. That’s what it seemed like. The sound was deafening, utterly drowning those bells, which had been unbearable only moments before. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear the crowd screaming, running, crying. I could imagine the pandemonium that must have descended. And even though I couldn’t hear it anymore, I knew Rachel was still getting her brains splintered by that damn bell.

“This is just the start,” Edgar said, almost giggly with excitement. “I’ve got ten C4 charges set all over the hotel, conveniently close to the gas mains. Disconnected the sprinkler system, too.” His eyes were wide and manic. I could barely stand to look at him. “This whole place is crumbling! Isn’t it wonderful?” He was totally consumed by his delusion, far worse than when I had seen him last. All vestiges of sanity, of humanity, were gone. “It’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ the greatest of the prophet’s stories, coupled with the greatest of his poems. ‘By the mystical magical tolling of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells!’ ”

It was getting hot back here. The fire outside was superheating the ballroom. Smoke inundated this dark, narrow passage behind the cathedral as well, making it difficult to speak or breathe.

He pushed a button and I heard another explosion. This one was farther away, but I was certain it was still inside the hotel. Maybe the casino. Maybe the spa. No telling how many people would be hurt or killed.

“It’s not too late for you,” he said breathlessly. “You could be Madeline to my Roderick. You could join us, Susan, join Rachel and Ginny and me. We’ll unite as comrades in the Golden Age.”

I thought fast. “I’d like that.”

“This can be the Day of Ascension for all of us, a passage from this virulent world to one of-” In the midst of his rapture, he loosened his grip on my neck and body. And that was all the invitation I needed. Mustering my strength, I bodychecked him against the cathedral. His head slammed back against a wooden beam. While he was momentarily stunned, I knocked the detonator out of his hand.

“No!” he screamed, but he was much too late to stop me. I scooped the detonator off the floor and shoved it into my pocket, then raised my fist to deliver a knockout blow to his solar plexus.

And he raised a gun. My gun.

“You don’t deserve to ascend,” he said bitterly, blinking from the pain, blood dripping down the side of his head. “You will die right here in this miserable world where you belong.”

He fired.

O’Bannon swore, but it wasn’t productive, because no one could possibly hear him. What the hell had happened? There’d been an explosion, and seconds later the whole ballroom was on fire. Within moments the front doors were congested and blocked. Bedlam ensued. Rabid partygoers were punching, screaming, crying, reeling, desperate to get away from the flames. Smoke billowed through the enclosed area, making it difficult to see or breathe. The air was thinning. Without an alternative exit, they’d all suffocate, maybe even before they burned.

Fighting his way through the mass hysteria, O’Bannon got to a side door-led to the kitchen, if he wasn’t mistaken. There was a crowd around, trying unsuccessfully to open it. Seemed to be locked from the other side. Well, he had the cure for that.

“Stand back,” he bellowed. He pulled out his weapon and fired three times at the lock mechanism.

Good thing it wasn’t chained, or even that might not have worked. As it was, the bullets weakened it enough that he could kick the door open. As soon as he did, the crowd surged through it, coughing, crying, gasping for air. But they had a way out. At least until that one was blocked.

A second explosion rocked the room. My God, he wondered, where did that one go off? How the hell did he stop this?

And what happened to Susan?

Last he’d seen of her, she’d headed behind that fake cathedral. She hadn’t emerged, at least not that he’d seen.

He scanned the still-packed room. No sign of her, and he couldn’t believe she’d just leave, not in the midst of all this chaos.

There was only one reason she would be back there while this turmoil was raging.

Cautiously, gun still in hand, he made his way toward the cathedral.

The bullet missed, at least in the sense that it didn’t kill me on the spot. It seared my right arm, creating a fierce burning pain that brought sudden tears to my eyes and gave me a bad case of the shakes.

“I hate this,” he said, and to my astonishment I saw that he had tears in his eyes as well. “The brutality of it. Firearms. This is not the way it should be. Why are you making me do this, Susan? Why?”

He lifted his arm and I could see that he was going to shoot again, going to shoot to kill this time, from a distance so short he couldn’t possibly miss.

I’m sorry, Rachel, I thought. I failed you. Just as I’ve always failed you.

“Susan! Duck!”

I recognized O’Bannon’s voice, but even if I hadn’t I would’ve obeyed. A bullet whizzed over my head and struck near Edgar-but not near enough. Edgar gritted his teeth, shifted his aim and fired, not once but three times. I heard a grunt that told me one of the slugs had made contact, followed by the sickening thud of a body hitting the floor.

“Nooo!” I screamed. I rushed forward while Edgar’s attention was focused on his new victim, tackling him under his gun arm. He fell back against the façade. The gun went flying. In this darkness, there was no way of knowing where it had gone. I punched Edgar again and again and again and he didn’t resist. I didn’t give him a chance. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to beat him senseless.

When I was sure he wasn’t going to get up again, I ran to the chief.

The bullet had caught him in the lower stomach, below his vest. It didn’t look as if it would be fatal if he got help in time. But I knew that stomach wounds were the most painful an officer could suffer.

He was shaking, too stricken to speak. I told him not to try, then called for immediate medical assistance. I assumed the ambulances were already converging, given the conflagration outside. I gave them O’Bannon’s location.

“You’re going to be okay,” I told him, and hoped he believed it. “Just stay put. Don’t try to move.”

I wanted to remain with him, but I couldn’t. Rachel was still up there, and the other girls. Every additional second they spent upside down in those things could be fatal.

I realized Edgar must’ve used the scaffolding to get the bodies up into those bells. So I would do the same to get them down.

By the time I ran through the cathedral door again, the ballroom was perhaps half empty, which was a damn good thing, because the flames were spreading fast. At least a third of the room was already ablaze. The air was thick with dense black smoke. Everyone was coughing and choking, black stains under their noses and mouths. I was finding it hard to breathe myself. But I put that out of my head. I had to get to Rachel.

The scaffolding levels were maybe seven feet apart. Edgar had no doubt used a ladder, but he hadn’t left that behind for me, so I just vaulted it. Up on the first level, I found round steel pylons, buckets of mortar, tools, signs of a barely completed construction process. I leaped up, grabbing the edge of the next level, my bullet-creased arm aching, and swung myself around. On the next riser, I was level with the bells.

Up close, I saw that Rachel was tied tightly across her entire body, ensuring that she couldn’t move or escape. But the other three girls were only bound at the feet, just enough to keep them on the clappers. Why hadn’t they escaped? Was it possible they’d let Abbott put them up there?

Rachel’s eyes were open, but I couldn’t gauge how conscious she was, hanging upside down for so long, her head thumping against the bell, that incredible noise shattering her eardrums. The side of her head closest to me was bleeding-not a good sign.

“Rachel!” I shouted. No reaction of any kind.

There was a narrow catwalk on the front of the cathedral, probably to give the workmen access to the bell chambers. With a cautious, tentative step, I edged off the riser onto the catwalk. From there, I was able to reach out and grab the edge of the bell.

It fought me. Nearly knocked me off the cathedral. I wobbled and teetered, noticing for the first time just how damn high up I was. But I held on to that damn bell.

It stopped. No more swinging. Rachel hung motionless in the center.

“Rachel!” Still no response.

I didn’t know whether I should untie Rachel first or stop the swinging of the other girls’ bells. And while I was deciding, the cathedral suddenly shot out from under my feet and I tumbled down into the smoky abyss.

Correction: my feet were knocked off the platform. By Edgar.

37

Somehow I managed to grab the edge of one of the risers and swing myself onto the second level. Edgar jumped down on the other side.

His face was bruised, bloodied. He was wheezing with each breath, coughing. And he had my gun.

“You’ve ruined everything.” His voice was harsh and gravelly from the smoke, and perhaps my beating. “My ascension. Virginia’s return. Dream-Land.”

“You need help,” I managed. “I told you that before.”

He held out his hand. “Give me the detonator.”

“So you can set off the other eight bombs? And kill even more people?”

“It’s for the greater good.”

While we talked I mentally measured the distance to the next riser, the chances of me making it before he could shoot. Where were the cops, the firemen? They were bound to appear soon. If I could just stall, just keep him talking…

“You’re starting to sound like me,” I said.

“I’m nothing like you, Susan.”

“You are. You’re rationalizing. Trying to justify the horrible things you do.”

“I’m trying to give us a new world. A better world! One that isn’t so… hard. You of all people should appreciate the value of that.”

“You have a good heart,” I said, and I truly believed it. “Maybe we all do. But it went wrong somehow. You haven’t done anything wonderful. You’ve killed innocent people.”

“No!” He fired. It missed me, but not by so much that I didn’t feel my heart skip several beats. “I’ve studied the prophet’s words. I was given the secret.”

Down below, the flames were everywhere. I knew it would not be long before the entire room, infrastructure and all, came crashing down. Where was my backup?

“Give it up, Abbott. Let me get you some help.”

He inched forward. “I want the detonator! Now!”

“Not gonna happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter what you do.”

He rushed me. I was caught off guard by the sudden change, not to mention the fact that I was on the edge of a riser some fourteen feet off the floor. I wrapped myself around his body and wrestled him down. He couldn’t get me in his sights, so he clubbed me over the head with the gun butt. That hurt. I fought to block out the pain, keep myself conscious.

He seemed possessed, as if one of Poe’s worst monsters had taken over his body. He kicked me repeatedly. I pushed up to my hands and knees and he kicked me again, flattening me. I felt something in my chest snap.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said, spitting blood. He kicked me in the mouth, loosening a tooth. “Like Poe said in Eureka, we’re free spirits. We can chart our own destiny.”

“In Dream-Land.”

“No. That’s where you got it wrong. He was talking about finding your own Dream-Land. He was talking about making this world a Dream-Land.”

“Liar. False prophet.”

I hauled myself up, hoping to make one final run at him, but he saw me coming. With both hands, he grabbed me by the neck and flung me backward. Off the riser. Into the flames.

I woke up and there were noises everywhere there were noises everywhere and they were so loud and it was just like the inside of my head except it was outside and the room was on fire everything was on fire and I don’t like fire I’m afraid of fire. Everyone was running and fighting to get out and I was going to get out too except I heard my dad calling and he sounded just like he did that time when he told me my mommy was dead and I wouldn’t get to see my mommy anymore. I ran to him and I saw him and he was hurt and he had red all over him. He was crawling and barely pulling himself along and his gun was in his hand and I don’t like guns I don’t like them at all but he was too weak to lift it up. I shouted for someone to help but no one was listening until someone told me he’d talked to the hospital and ambulances were coming and I tried to get my dad out of there before the entire room burned down and there was a scream! There was a scream I knew it was a scream and I knew who it was even before I saw her it was Susan and she was falling falling and she fell so far please God don’t let her be dead please don’t please don’t please don’t please don’t let the Bad Man take away our babies. Susan is my friend doesn’t he know Susan is my friend just like Brian in the fifth grade was my friend until they took him away to another school but Susan is still my friend and I want her to stay to be my friend. Please don’t hurt her. People should not hurt each other! People should not hurt each other!

I hit the floor back first, head tucked, then rolled, like they teach us at the academy, but I was certain I’d broken my right arm. Maybe a leg. It sure hurt enough. Possibly had a concussion. I didn’t have time to do a personal inventory. As soon as I opened my eyes, he was standing there, hovering over me, his foot between my legs.

“You know I loved you. You know that.” He looked like Satan, with belching smoke and billowing flames in the background.

Blood trickled out of my mouth when I tried to speak. I knew I couldn’t escape. He could pump three rounds into my skull before I could blink. “You had a damn funny way of showing it.”

“I let you live.”

A silence fell, blocking out the fiery chaos surrounding us.

“I did that for no other,” he continued. “It was not the will of the Raven, but I did it, because I so desperately wanted you to see the path.” His lips trembled. “You must hate me.”

“No.” And as I spoke, staring up at his twisted, pathetic face, I realized it was true. Whatever anger I’d had, whatever enmity I’d borne, was gone now. “I don’t hate you. I did. But not anymore. I told you already. We’re a lot alike.”

“We are?”

I nodded. “Both haunted. Both screwed to the max.” I wiped the blood from my mouth. “I used to think you were evil. Like if I demonized your psychosis, that somehow made it easier to deal with.” I laughed. “Hell, you’re not evil.”

“I’m… not?”

“No. You’re just a poor schmuck who misses his sister. Like I miss my husband.”

He hovered over me, gun still pointed, listening.

“I couldn’t forgive my husband for what he did. And I channeled all that anger against you. But that’s no way to live. I’m not going to spend my whole life angry, tearing myself apart. I forgive you.”

“You-what?”

“You heard me. I forgive you.”

He hesitated, gun wavering, sweat and blood trickling down the sides of his face. “You know I can’t let you live.”

I spat more blood out of my mouth. Something inside me was broken. I couldn’t remain conscious much longer. “So if you’re going to kill me, do it already. What do I get, the axe? I don’t think you have time for dental surgery.”

His face knotted up. “You are so… hard on me.” He pressed the gun against the side of my head. “I’m sorry, Susan. Goodbye.”

The gun fired. I winced. And waited, expecting to feel the intense pain-and release-that did not come. Always I think I’ve made it, but it never, never comes.

I opened my eyes. Abbott had crumpled to the floor. And behind him stood Darcy, shaking from head to foot, his normally inexpressive face contorted with pain, his eyes streaming tears.

He was holding his father’s gun.

38

After that, everything got kind of fuzzy. I know police and fire teams invaded the ballroom, and I know they got me out of there. Darcy hovered by my side the whole time. He was horribly torn up about what he had done. I knew it would haunt him for a long time, maybe forever. But at that moment, all he seemed to care about was me.

Next couple of days were pretty much a haze, too, but I eventually got the lowdown on what had happened in the aftermath. There were surprisingly few casualties from the fire. Many injuries, lots of smoke-inhalation-related respiratory problems, but only a few fatalities, mostly because O’Bannon had blasted open an exit to speed up the evacuation. That ballroom and the one adjoining it were wrecked, but most of the rest of the hotel was still sound. I’d prevented Abbott from detonating the remaining incendiary bombs, which were found and removed.

O’Bannon was seriously wounded and would be in the hospital for months. He’d already had his phone rerouted to his room in the recovery ward and had all his open files sent over. He might be laid up, but he was definitely not out of commission.

Patrick had been killed with an axe, which Abbott had apparently brought along to cut the rope he used to string up the girls. We assumed he’d come upon Abbott at work and Abbott killed him. Hid the body where he thought no one would find it, at least not before the explosions started. What a waste. He was a good man, a kind man. A rarity, in our field. I miss him.

Abbott died, almost instantly. Darcy’s gunshot got him in the brain. Although I could empathize with the pain his life had brought him, I had no regrets about his execution. He had crossed the threshold into utter psychosis. No drug therapy ever would have brought him back. It was better this way.

Rachel was alive. The bells hadn’t been as hard as they looked-not real iron. She still had a concussion and had suffered some hearing loss, at least temporarily. But she was alive. And the docs told me that if I hadn’t gotten to her when I did and stopped that bell, she might not have made it.

That was something, anyway.

The other three girls, Tiffany and Judy and JJ, were also alive, but seriously messed up, far worse than Rachel. They hadn’t been in their bells as long-apparently they had helped him secure Rachel-but they were suffering severe psychological trauma from their time in captivity. It would be a long while before they were normal again, if indeed they ever were. But they were alive, and where there’s life, there’s hope. Right?

This time, I let the docs keep me in the hospital just as long as they wanted. I was in no hurry, and it gave me time to do some thinking. Which for me, was long overdue.

After six days, I was released. My arm was in a cast, my leg bore a brace, and I had a cracked rib, but I was out of there. Lisa picked me up at the hospital.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

“Positive.” I wondered if I needed a friend who was a better driver, because each little bump of her Porsche radiated through my tethered arm and leg. “Thanks for being my chauffeur.”

“Hell, honey, you’re unsafe at any speed when you’re well. No way I’m letting you drive.” She paused. “But this could wait.”

“No, I want to do it now.” I reached out and lightly ran my fingers across her cheek. “I love you.”

She kept her eyes fixed on the road. “Tell me the trauma of your near-death experience hasn’t made you realize that you are at heart a lesbian.”

I smiled. “No.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows you couldn’t be a worse kisser than some of the male lovers I’ve had.”

“No. Just wanted to tell you. I know you’ve been taking care of me. Not just the big stuff, like driving and finding places for me to live, moving me and taking care of my life while I drank myself into oblivion. I know you’re the one who put Sugar Babies in my empty holster. Who quietly replaced my ratty old black turtleneck with a much nicer new one. Who kept taping Dr. Phil and leaving it on my VCR.”

Lisa’s eyes crinkled. “That’s what friends are for.”

I laid my head on her shoulder. “Alcoholics don’t usually have friends. They don’t deserve them. But you stuck with me through it all. I won’t forget it.”

She blushed, actually blushed. “Have you given any more thought to L.A.? It’s a great house in a great town. Swimming pools, movie stars. It would be good for you.”

“I know it would. You’re right, as always.”

“You flatterer. So… chick night tonight? TNT is running a MacGyver retrospective.”

“You’re on, girl.”

My esteemed lawyer, Quentin Delacourt, stared uncomprehendingly across his desk. I knew I should be taking his mystification more seriously. But he was wearing a red bow tie, and how can you take anyone seriously when they’re wearing a red bow tie?

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You want to give it up?”

“Right. Throw in the towel. Call it quits.”

“But-”

The Shepherds were also in his office, at my invitation. “I just wanted you all to know. The battle is over.”

“But Susan-” The lawyer leaned forward. “Do you understand what will be the consequences of this action?”

“Yeah. I get that.” There was a sudden thickness in my chest that I tried to ignore. At any rate, I wasn’t going to let it show. “Just get me some visitation rights, okay? So I can see her every now and again.”

“That won’t be any problem,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Whatever you want.”

I turned toward him, shutting the lawyer out. “You’ve been pretty hostile to me in the past.”

He cleared his throat. “It’s possible that… my opinion has changed.”

His wife cut in. “I don’t want to intrude, but… may I ask why you’re doing this?”

I sucked in my breath. “Because you’re better for her than I am. I know that now. I guess I always did, really, but I didn’t want to admit it. I’m not saying this is forever-I’m going to try like hell to pull myself together, and if I do, I’ll want to talk about custody again. But for now-this is best for Rachel.”

Mr. Shepherd held out his hand. “You’re doing the right thing, Lieutenant.”

I took the hand with my good arm and shook it firmly. “I know I am. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Take good care of my girl, okay?”

“We will. And Lieutenant?”

“Yeah?”

“You take good care of yourself.”

One last stop before the hearing. I could tell Lisa didn’t think this was a good idea, but she took me anyway. Let me stop by the florist, then onward.

Not many people at the cemetery this time of day. A groundskeeper, a few scattered mourners. Found David’s grave in no time at all. It looked pretty scruffy, barren, unkempt. ’Course, I hadn’t been here since the day he was interred.

I stood there just staring at the grave for the longest time before I finally spoke. “Look, it’s not like it was a gigantic surprise or anything. I knew that you were… confused. I knew your interest in me… sexually… was declining. I’d seen the way you turned away whenever a hot-looking guy passed us in the mall. How unconvincing you were, laughing much too loudly whenever Granger made crude remarks about a Super Bowl cheerleader’s anatomy. And I know, intellectually, as a psychologist, that it was no reflection on me. Not that that’s stopped me from engaging in humiliating, degrading affairs, desperately trying to prove to myself that I might actually be desirable to someone.”

I drew in my breath, then slowly released it. “My point is, I had my suspicions for a long time. I just didn’t expect to have them confirmed the way I did. To come home and find you… you…”

I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead, trying to stop the mental movie from replaying. “I’m sorry I threw that huge fit in the office. I had no right to do that, not in front of your friends, co-workers, even if they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. They still don’t know. I never told anyone and I never will. But what you did, David-” I felt myself tearing up, something I promised myself I would not do. I steeled myself, then started again.

“I mean, bottom line, I didn’t care about any of that. You were what you were. But whatever you were… I needed you. Rachel needed you. And to just… leave us like that, leave me feeling guilty and betrayed and… alone. That was what hurt, David. That was what screwed me up the most. That was what I couldn’t forget-or forgive. We didn’t get a chance to work it out. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.”

The wind whistled through the barren oaks that dotted the yellow field. A few crows circled overhead, singing their sad songs. “But you were right. It’s time to move on, sugar bear.”

I crouched down and laid a single red rose across his resting place. “Consider yourself forgiven.”

The Bad Man still comes for me, but he comes in my dreams. Daddy says that it isn’t real but it is real I know it is just like I dreamed that Mommy would leave and she did and she never came back and now the Bad Man is dead but he keeps coming for me and I don’t know when he will ever stop.

I saw Susan in the hospital and she looked broken but better and I asked one of the doctors who looked at me like I was a weirdo but he told me she could still have babies and that made me happy.

I don’t miss the Bad Man but I miss being a policeman. I’m glad Susan is getting out of the hospital so I can be a policeman again. Susan is my friend. Everything has been better since she came to see my dad that night and I don’t know if she knows that she makes me happy but she makes me get tingly when she winks at me and has sort of a happiness beam that she shoots out and I feel like I could do more things when she’s around I feel like I could do anything I could focus like my dad tells me to focus focus and I could be of use to people. If Susan wanted me to.

It’s lonely here without my dad. I used to dream about being alone and not having my dad scowling and being disappointed in me all the time but now that he is gone it isn’t nearly as nice as I thought it was going to be.

I was feeling fairly buoyant when I hobbled into the hearing. And devastated when I left. Like what little I had left had been ripped away from me. As if I had nothing, nothing at all.

Never being one to display much decorum, much less sense, I confronted him in his hospital room.

“You did this to me, didn’t you?”

O’Bannon sat up. “What are you talking about?”

“I had my hearing today. With IA. For reinstatement.”

“How did it go?”

“I thought it went brilliantly. They complimented me on my work on the Edgar case. Talked about the pleasure they got from the fact that all those FBI dudes went home empty-handed while one of theirs made the collar. Talked about my impressive courage and resilience. How I seemed to be conquering my personal demons. I thought I had it made in the shade.”

“And?”

I punched his pillow. “And then they pulled out the report you filed. You blackballed me, you son of a bitch.”

“Hardly that. I just said-”

“You knew they wouldn’t reinstate me against your wishes. Your recommendation was critical!”

“Susan, listen to me.”

“Why should I, you bastard? I did your dirty work for you! I caught your killer. I even-I even-what he did to me-” I broke down. Just lost it.

O’Bannon intervened. “Susan, stop.”

“Why should I?” I screamed. “I wanted my job back! Don’t you understand-it’s all I have left!”

He looked at me with tired, cheerless eyes. “You’re not ready, Susan.”

“Who the hell are you to judge?”

“You know it as well as I do. If I reinstate you, that means you carry a gun. That means maybe a partner depends on you for their life. Are you ready for that kind of responsibility?”

“I caught Edgar!”

“You’re an alcoholic, Susan. We both know it. I think you’re trying to pull yourself out of that gutter, but how can I know whether you’ll make it? You’re a brilliant behaviorist, but until I’m certain you’re one hundred percent, I will not put another officer’s life in your hands.”

I fell back in my chair, feeling all the pain, the hurt, the futility wash over me. “What can I do?”

“You can go back to those IOP meetings, for starters. Join AA. Get a sponsor. Read the Big Book. Work the steps.”

“I’m not the talky-feely type.”

“You’ll force yourself. You’ll get better. And when your doctor tells me you’re solid, I’ll put you back on the team. In the meantime, your consultation contract continues. Believe me, I can find plenty for you to do. You won’t be bored.”

He fiddled with the controls on his hospital bed, raising himself. “And now that we’ve got that out of the way, would you mind dropping by the house to check on Darcy? He called the front desk-he’s having some kind of problem. He’s been all by himself since I went into the hospital. He’s a good kid, but-you know how he is. He needs someone looking out for him. And God knows there’s no one he likes better than you.”

“Oh, that’s not-”

“Don’t kid a kidder, Susan. He adores you. I’m his old man, sure, but I know the score. I love him, but he’s wary of me. Too much discipline-or attempted discipline, anyway. Too many mistakes. Too many unresolved issues. And I’m laid up. So would you run by and see what’s going on? He probably just needs someone to hold his hand for a minute. Would you do that?”

“If I say yes, will you reinstate me?”

“Hell, no. But I’d consider it a personal favor. I think your daddy would, too.”

Bastard would play any card in his deck, wouldn’t he? “Fine, I’ll go. But you can stuff your damn consulting contract.”

“Are you sure? Why?”

“After I see Darcy, I’m blowing town.”

I rang the bell and Darcy came to the door almost immediately. His eyes were like balloons. His hands were flapping. He ran around in circles, screaming, barely coherent, even worse than when I’d taken him to that sex club. “Fire! Fire!”

I raced inside. The kitchen was indeed on fire, flames shooting out from the microwave oven. Looked like he’d been reheating some Pizza Hut chicken wings, but he’d left the food in the box with the foil wrapping. Darcy ran circles around the kitchen table, screaming, running his fingers through his hair. He collided into the wall. He fell backward against the table and hit his head.

I grabbed him and held him in place. “Darcy, where is the fire extinguisher?”

He was so messed up he couldn’t talk, could only point. I opened the pantry door and grabbed the extinguisher. A minute or so later, the fire was out. But the kitchen was a mess. As was Darcy.

He crumpled on the floor, hunched over the linoleum, rocking back and forth, babbling incoherently, hitting himself in the face.

“I called and asked Dad about dinner but Dad couldn’t fix dinner so I thought that’s fine I’ll fix my own dinner and I did but the oven was mad at me and it started a fire and I didn’t know what to do and…”

On and on and on. He hit himself so hard he made bruises.

I had to do something. I reached around him with my good arm and grabbed both hands, restraining him. Becoming his human straitjacket.

“All I wanted was something to eat but there was no one here and there’s never anyone here anymore and I was all alone and I didn’t know what to do and did you know that sixty-seven percent of all domestic fires begin in the kitchen but I opened the microwave and the flames just leaped out they just leaped out like they were trying to get me they wanted to punish me because I did a bad thing a really really bad thing…”

I hugged him tighter and tried to speak in a soft, soothing voice. I figured it didn’t really matter what I said. He just needed to hear someone. It was hard, because I had one arm in a cast and the other ached at the wrist, but I held on to him.

“It hurt so much and I was all alone and I didn’t know why the Bad Man came why the Bad Man always comes when I’m asleep I didn’t want to hurt him I didn’t want to hurt anyone I didn’t hurt Mommy I really didn’t but he was going to hurt Susan because I wanted to ask you about babies and I couldn’t let him hurt Susan…”

God, my heart ached for him. He couldn’t be left on his own like this.

I whispered into his ear. “It’s all right, Darcy. Susan is here. Susan is right here.”

“And sometimes it’s dark and I hear these noises and I don’t know what the noises are and I don’t like it when people touch me why do people always want to touch me I want to be touched but when they touch me it makes me want to run away and I don’t want to be here by myself anymore I don’t I don’t I don’t…”

I felt myself choking, feeling his pain, wondering what it must have been like for Chief O’Bannon, raising this boy by himself all those years, dealing with this kind of panic attack not just once when you happen to drop by but every day, every day of your life.

The words tumbled out of me. I didn’t even think before I spoke. This boy had done so much for me, had supported me throughout this whole horrific case. Maybe it was time I returned the favor. “It’s all right, Darcy. I’m here. And I’m not going anywhere.”

I held him like that for more than an hour before he calmed down. I didn’t mind. Even though it hurt, I didn’t mind. Once he was calm again, I fixed a proper dinner, then cleaned up the kitchen mess and made myself a place to sleep on the couch.

I took a shower, and when I stepped out of the bathroom with-thank God-a towel wrapped around myself, I found Darcy standing outside the door.

He was gasping for air and dripping with perspiration. And he was holding a frozen custard in each hand.

“I hope that you are in the mood for custard. I thought that you might be in the mood but I wasn’t sure so I ran all the way to Third Street. And back.”

“Just because you wanted me to have a bedtime snack?”

His face was like a shimmering sheet of tinfoil. “Because any day you have a custard is a Very Excellent Day. And I thought that maybe you could use a Very Excellent Day.”

That night, before I fell asleep, I cried. Streams of tears, endless flows of salt water, cascading down my face. But it was a good cry. One I’d been saving up for a long time.

Guess I won’t be going to L.A. after all.