“Bill? What the hell . . . where have you been?” She tried to stay calm, but her voice was shaken, her heart trying to find a rhythm it was comfortable with.
“I had to find Teddy, didn’t I?” His lips were against her ear, a soft cold whisper of flesh against flesh. Bill had always loved to nibble her ears during foreplay. The thought chilled her as much as the feel of his cold flesh pressing to her. “We have to be a family again, Michelle. We have to be together.”
Teddy’s hands were still in her hair and they clenched suddenly, hard powerful little grips that pulled her face up until she could look at him. See him for the first time. In the near darkness, his eyes were aglow, lit by fires the color of winter moonlight. His skin was sallow, pasty white. His teeth were bared in a smile that had nothing to do with joy or love or compassion. And then he leaned down as fast as a striking cobra and his teeth were biting, tearing into her flesh.
Michelle screamed, with the sudden and unbearable pain that was second only to the understanding that this was not her son. Teddy bit deeper, his cold face pressed to her neck and his tongue digging at the incisions he made, penetrating and tasting her life.
Bill bit her too, his mouth on the other side of her throat. The pain was worse by far, as his teeth punctured her skin, her muscles. His hands slid down and cupped her breasts in a sick mockery of the love they’d known, no matter how cold and distant it had become.
Michelle struggled. She fought and she pushed and she screamed loudly enough to hear her voice echo off the nearby trees. The darkness was almost complete, and even her car was too distant to bring a hope that someone would come and stop the insanity. Michelle cried and begged her family to leave her in peace.
That was not an option for her husband and child. They wanted what they always wanted: to be a family again.
One big, happy family.
Chapter 13
I
Some days it didn’t pay to get out of bed. Truer words had never been spoken. It was just after midnight when Brian Freemont found the silver Mercedes parked against a tree. The engine was dead, but the hood was still warm. He called it in immediately.
The car belonged to Michelle Aarons Lister. There was no sign of her, but he could see the car keys were still in the ignition. He thought about going to look for her, to see if she had crawled away or been dragged, but after the verbal ass-fucking Captain O’Neill had given him earlier, he decided to follow procedure and wait.
O’Neill was not a happy man. It turned out that Brian hadn’t tossed his cookies on just anyone. Oh, no, that would have been an easy enough thing to escape from. No, he’d managed to blow chunks all over the legs and pants of the police commissioner’s son-in-law.
O’Neill was normally a good man to deal with; he’d always had an open-door policy and he’d been enthusiastic about his reviews for Brian since he’d joined the force. He was even sympathetic to Brian’s current dilemmas; he knew all about Angie’s disappearance and the fact that she was six months pregnant with their first child.
His example of mercy was to let Brian keep his job and stay on patrol. But O’Neill was not happy. He was never happy, he went on to explain, when the Commissioner himself called his house at three in the morning to rip him a new asshole. It was going to take a lot of ass-kissing to get anywhere near a promotion or raise, which sucked, because the captain had also made clear he’d been very close to stepping to the next level before the reprimand.
So now, it was by the book. End of discussion.
For ten minutes he was alone in the woods. The accident was off the road, and even with his flashers strobing through the night, it was foggy and murky; dark enough that he had to wonder if he was seeing things. There was movement around the edges of a few trees, flickering little traces that were there and then gone an instant later. He ignored them at first, but they were becoming more active, more distracting.
Brian eased his hand down to the holster on his hip. To date he’d never drawn the weapon in the line of duty, never had a reason to. He wanted to keep it that way. Still, he wasn’t willing to take any chances.
“Mrs. Lister?” No one answered his call.
But there were sounds now, to go with the movements. Scratching noises and occasionally a few pieces of bark could be seen falling in the off and on lights. They made a sound like hail falling across sandpaper as they struck the ground.
And the sounds were coming from several places at once.
The hairs on Brian’s neck rose and his hand unclasped the snap that held his pistol in place. “Whoever’s out there better knock it off!”
The sounds continued, undaunted.
“This is police business, and I am not in the mood to play with you!” He was starting to sweat and he could hear a ringing sound in his ears that he knew had nothing at all to do with the world outside of his skull.
A pinecone bounced off the back of his head hard and sharp. He let out a little yelp as he turned to see where it had come from.
There was nothing to see, but he could swear he heard a woman giggling.
His vision went red. Some little bitch was playing games with him and that was enough to make him want to shoot first and ask questions later.
“You come on out where I can see you, right now!”
“We’re right here, Freemont.” The voice came from almost directly behind him and he turned fast, drawing his weapon.
He realized an instant later that he had made a horrible mistake. Detectives Richard Boyd and Daniel Holdstedter had their revolvers drawn and aimed at his face before he could finish sighting.
“PUT THE FUCKEN GUN DOWN!” Boyd didn’t need a bullhorn, his voice echoed off the trees. Even in the darkness he could feel the eyes of the man burning at him.
He dropped the pistol and held his hands up. Danny Holdstedter had him on the ground and eating leaves five seconds after that.
“You outta your fuckin’ mind, Freemont?”
“Danny, someone was fucking with me out here!”
The detective frisked him hard and fast, flipping him over like a fish and checking his front as well. He pulled a six-pack of condoms from Freemont’s front shirt pocket, along with a pen and a shopping list.
“Nice, Freemont. Figured on getting lucky in the woods?” Holdstedter waved the package in the air for Boyd to see.
“That’s sweet. Good to see a man who has faith that his wife will return to his loving arms, isn’t it, Danny-Boy?”
“Oh, yeah. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”
“Strap his legs, too. Then we’re gonna have a look around.”
“What? Hey, come on, guys! It was an honest mistake.”
Boyd walked closer and looked down at him. “No, Freemont, it was a stupid fucken rookie thing to do.” The detective’s eyes crawled over him like he was being forced to carefully examine a large pile of dog shit. “Then again, let’s look at the source.”
Holdstedter pulled a long white zip tie and locked his ankles together while Boyd watched. “Stay put, dipshit. We ain’t done talking about this.” Boyd took the time to pick up Brian’s revolver and remove the shells before putting the weapon in his jacket pocket. The two detectives went over to the wrecked car and began talking.
Brian watched them as they moved around the car and examined the ground carefully. A few minutes later they were gone and Brian was left alone. He sat very still, afraid to move.
The sounds started up again when the other cops were out of hearing range. He tried to ignore them as they came closer . . . slowly, steadily.
II
Business and pleasure do not always mix. Maggie knew that very well. She was reminded when she spent the night with Leonard Morton. Leonard was a large man, half-bald and sweaty on the best days. He was pleasant enough, actually rather charming in old-fashioned ways, but he was also, simply put, a bit of a pig. He even had the nose for the assignment.
Still, she did what she had to and stayed the night as she had been paid to do. And if she felt worse about it than she normally did, well, that was to be expected when you got right down to it. She suspected Ben would know what she was doing and that bothered her more than she wanted it to.
Tom was going to pay for that. She didn’t know how, but he was going to regret fucking with her. Thinking about his sorry excuse for a face made her grind her teeth together. She could feel a headache coming on and he would pay for that, too.
She just had to work out the details.
She got home a little before the sun rose. The apartments were all dark, which was about what she’d expected.
There was a note against her front door. It was written on the same antiqued stock as the poem she’d gotten a week earlier and the few pieces of artwork and poetry she’d seen in Ben’s bedroom.
She opened the single piece of paper and read the words carefully.
It read:
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
Thanks for keeping me not alone,
Ben
She folded the paper and looked over her shoulder to the window of his place. Silly, really, that a poem could make her feel better. But it did.
She took the paper inside her apartment and carefully set it out on the kitchen table. A few hours under a frying pan would take the worst of the wrinkles out, and after that she planned on pinning it to the wall.
She was just getting ready for a few hours of sleep when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Well, I kind of expected a phone call from you today.” Tom’s voice crawled through the receiver. He was sounding like he was ready for a fight.
“Really? Why?” He wasn’t the only one who could do innocent.
There was complete silence on the other end for a few seconds. Monkey Boy had to think. It was seldom a pretty thing to watch and almost always took longer than should be necessary.
“Well, just because I haven’t heard from you lately.” He was puzzled. She didn’t much care.
“Hey, school keeps me busy and the client list isn’t getting any smaller.”
“So, Jason Soulis called me. He wants to get together with you tonight.”
“Okay. He can give me a ring to set up the particulars. Anything else?”
“Uhh. No, I guess that about does it.”
“Well, there it is. Talk to you soon, Tom.” She hung up before he could say anything else. She didn’t want to hear his voice, didn’t want to think about him. She wanted free of him, once and for all.
It was time to move on. She had enough money to handle it, but it would take time to work out the details: time or a gun big enough to erase Monkey Boy off the face of the earth. Maggie liked the second idea better, but wasn’t stupid enough to do anything about it.
III
Ben watched Maggie go inside her apartment and breathed a sigh of relief. With all of the people who had vanished of late, he didn’t exactly love the idea of her being out all night.
She cast her eyes in his direction and he studied her as he always did. Every detail of her face fascinated him. He wondered, as he did from time to time when he was feeling a bit self-conscious, whether or not he qualified as a stalker. There was something wrong with watching her as often as he did, and he knew that, but couldn’t stop it.
Didn’t want to stop it.
It still wasn’t any of his business what she did with her life, but that didn’t change how he felt. He was in love with the girl next door. The only reason she lived across the courtyard from him was because, once he decided he liked to see her, he found out where she lived and moved in. Elegant, beautiful, quiet, studious; she was all of those things and that, more than anything else, had caught his attention. She could have been a truck driver and he would have felt the same way. She was a prostitute and he knew he could deal with it. All sins were forgivable when faced with love.
Once she went inside her apartment, he sighed and let himself breathe again. Then he turned on one of the cell phones he’d purchased to deal with Brian Freemont and plugged it into the modem of his laptop. He was done with Freemont. The sick bastard would be suffering plenty in the near future.
His hand ran along his ribs and he winced. He was not done with Thomas Alexander Pardue. The long list of research notes he’d written down earlier was on his left and the computer was on his right.
“Fuck with me, Tom? Trust me; you don’t know what being fucked is.”
It was just possible that Pardue would figure out who was behind it when the time came, but long before then, Ben would be done with him. His fingers tapped keys with the skill of a surgeon and he started his own symphony; a song just for Tom, a special song of desperation and financial ruin.
He blinked away a few tears as he worked. They were not tears of sorrow, he was beyond that and had been for a long time. They were tears of rage. Ben had been a victim plenty of times in his life. Pardue was hardly the first man he’d ever run across who felt the need to kick his face in and he likely wouldn’t be the last.