Deliver Us From Evil

66

REGGIE LOOKED AROUND the small footprint of her dingy flat in London. There was a lumpy four-poster bed, an old chest that had belonged to her mother, a square of frayed carpet, a table with two straight-backed chairs, a hotplate, a small under-the-counter fridge, a four-foot-high shelf crammed with books, and two dirty windows that looked out on the back of another grimy building. Her single potted plant was quite dead because a freak heat wave that had hit London while she was gone had baked her room, which sat defenseless without the benefit of central air-conditioning. The toilet and shower were down the hall. The folks in her building were early risers and if she wanted to bathe with even moderately hot water she had to get there by 6 a.m.

I’m twenty-eight and still live like I’m at university.

She’d showered in cold water since she’d arrived home late, and then changed into the only clean clothes she had left in her closet. She bagged up her dirty laundry with the intent of washing it later in the facilities downstairs. Since she’d been gone awhile, her fridge held nothing edible. She ate breakfast at a café down the street, taking her time over eggs, coffee, and a buttery croissant. She’d charged her phone and sent a text to Whit. She’d received an immediate reply. All their people had gotten out safely. One had even gone to the villa and retrieved her personal things and brought them back to England. In his message Whit wanted to know where Shaw was. He wrote, “Make sure he can’t find Harrowsfield.” She emailed him back and told him that Shaw was no longer with her and that she would make sure she wasn’t followed.

Walking down the street Reggie stretched her arms and worked the kinks out of her legs. The boat ride had been horrible, pitching and swaying nonstop. Shaw had taken the ordeal easily in stride. He’d never once become sick. He just sat at a table, reading a book and even eating, and would hand her towels and a bucket when she needed it, which was frequently.

When she would glance up at him for sympathy she didn’t receive any. Then she felt guilty for even seeking it. It was an unforgiving business and one had to tough it out. He certainly had. She, on the other hand, had come up a little short with her sea legs. At least she was safely back in England, as was her entire team. While it was true they had missed Kuchin, things could be far worse.

She rode the Tube to Knightsbridge. She was heading out to Harrowsfield later to brief the others but had something to do first. She had a sixty-millimeter-size safe deposit box housed at a company that specialized in storing people’s valuables. It had all the latest technological security devices-biometric scanners, access cards, and each box wired directly to the closest police station while closed-circuit cameras monitored the vault. This level of security cost nearly a hundred pounds a year and was worth every penny to her.

She entered the building and successfully passed through the various layers of security. Alone in the vault room, she accessed her box and slid out the contents. Making sure her back was between the camera overhead and the items she was looking at, Reggie sat down at the table and began to read through things she knew by heart.

This was her ritual. After every mission she came and did this. All other times she had been successful. This was her first miss, her first loss, her first ass-kicking. But still here she was. It was important.

The newspaper articles were old and yellowed. Over time the paper would fully disintegrate, but the information contained in the pages would never be erased from her mind. Some days she wished that it would disappear.

Robert O’Donnell, age thirty-six. The photo of the man was a faded black-and-white, but Reggie had no trouble recognizing him. He was her father, after all. He’d died on her seventh birthday. The headline from the Daily Mail had covered all the basic points and added in its typical dash of hyperbole:

London ’s Most Notorious Serial Killer Since Jack the Ripper Dead!

It was not exactly what a little girl wanted to read about her dad on her birthday.

Twenty-four victims, all female and all in their teens and twenties, had died at her father’s sadistic hands. At least those were the ones that were known. People had even compared him to the American serial killer Ted Bundy, who’d been executed around that time. A charming, good-looking man who’d lured young women to their deaths. Except Bundy had not been married with children. He’d been a loner. Reggie’s father had a good job, a loving wife, and a boy and a girl. And yet somehow over the years he’d managed to slaughter at least two dozen human beings with such ferocity and depravity that veteran constables who’d discovered some of the bodies had spent time afterwards in therapy to help them through the horrors they’d witnessed.

Even now, once the truth had been established past all doubt, she still couldn’t quite bring herself to accept that the man who had helped create her was the same man in these horrible stories. She looked at another newspaper, one written on the fourth anniversary of her father’s death. It had a full-page picture of him in his last days. In the face Reggie could see a man possessed by something not human at all. But she also saw something else that terrified her even more.

My eyes. My nose. My mouth. My chin.

Physically she was far more her father than her mother. Physically.

The end of her father’s violent life had been crushing because it also marked the end of the other two lives she cared most about. Her mother’s. And her beloved older brother’s.

It was her brother who had been the hero. At age twelve and having figured out what his father had done, Lionel O’Donnell had gone to the police. At first they had not believed the ramblings of a child. They were swamped with leads, most of them false, and under enormous pressure to catch the worst serial killer any of them could remember.

It was only afterwards that they realized he was right. By then it was too late. Her entire family had perished on a single day. Her enraged father had discovered his son’s betrayal and killed them. He would’ve killed Reggie too if the police hadn’t arrived when they did. She still had nightmares about it. She supposed she would always have nightmares.

Reggie turned to another article and started trembling as soon as she saw the photo and caption underneath. The girl’s hair was done in pigtails. The eyes were vacant. The small mouth was set in a thin, unemotional line. No joy, no sadness, no feelings at all. More than twenty years later Reggie struggled to remember what it felt like to be photographed that day. Where she was, what she’d been thinking.

Her gaze drifted to the caption underneath: Only surviving family member Jane Regina O’Donnell, age seven.

The next weeks, months, even years were a frantic whirl of events. Her mother’s family took her in. They left the country. New lives were set up. Nothing was ever said about the past-not her mother, her brother, and certainly not the monster of a father. And yet Reggie, armed with her mother’s maiden name instead of her father’s, had eventually come back to the city where he’d committed his atrocities. Her identity had been buried deep. She was no longer seven and vacant. She was Reggie Campion, a grown woman on a mission rebuilding a life from the catastrophic ruins of her past.

And yet she now wondered, and not for the first time, whether Professor Miles Mallory knew who she really was. And if that was why he’d approached her. He had never given any indication that he did know her true history, but he was also the sort of man who wouldn’t have let on if he did.

There were other items in the box, yet she decided to look at only two more. One was a photo of her mother, a petite blonde woman whom Reggie remembered as innocent if not overly intelligent or curious, and yet someone who loved her children unconditionally. The second item was a photo of her brother, Lionel, who had gone to the police and ended the monster’s reign in London, though it had cost him his life. Even at age twelve, he was tall, like his father, who had been six-four and well over two hundred pounds. Lionel took after their mother, not in stature, but in looks. The hair was light, the eyes a dim blue, the mouth usually curled into a smile. But not in this picture. This was a photo of her brother lying dead in his coffin. Reggie didn’t know where it had come from, only that she’d discovered it years ago and now found herself unable to part with it. It was sick, macabre, she realized that. But it was also a reminder of her brother’s ultimate sacrifice to save all of them from evil.

She put the items back in the box, locked it up, and slid it back into the wall vault receptacle. Reggie returned to her flat, packed a bag, climbed in her little car, and drove to Harrowsfield.

On the way there she thought of nothing else other than how to get one more chance at Fedir Kuchin. Well, that was not entirely true. Another tall man with dark hair kept uncomfortably intruding on those thoughts too.

Where was Shaw now?